Justin Wolfers

And as I mentioned, that's currently just about at its lowest level ever.

And there's a question, does it really make sense to think that people are more depressed today than they were during the COVID lockdowns or just after Lehman Brothers collapsed on the cusp of the Great Recession?

And maybe it doesn't make much sense.

So one possibility is actually what we've seen is the way that people answer surveys has changed.

So it turned out for many, many years, if you called someone and asked them how the economy is doing, they'd tell you how the economy is doing.

They thought of economics just as economics.

And what's happened is we've become increasingly partisan over time.

And you can basically date this to the day that Trump walked down the golden escalator.

We start to see everything through a partisan lens now.

And so what happens now is you call someone and you ask them, how do you feel about the state of the economy?

And often what they do instead is they answer the question, how do you feel about the present?

And so Democrats say, I feel like it's in a terrible recession.

And Republicans say, I think it's booming extraordinarily.

And so the correlation between people's feelings about the economy and their partisan views has become incredibly strong, perhaps so strong that we're not learning anything about their views about the economy.

Here's the other thing.

During good economic times, you might expect 80% of people to be confident about the economy.

But if we've got a sample that's half Democrat and half Republican, and half the Republicans think it's terrible and half the Democrats think it's wonderful, then we're going to end up with 50% saying that they think it's a good economy.

And so this could actually be what's pushing consumer confidence down.

The measurements are all honest, but they no longer mean the same thing that we thought that they once mean.

Now, Ben, I hope I've impressed you with my capacity to bore you.