Thread by @ezraklein

I've been thinking about this chart, which shows people rating their personal finances highly, and the national economy and "buying climate" poorly.

On one level, it's weird: How can so many feel good about their finances and bad about the economy?

But look at it another way.

One interpretation of the gap, the one many liberals like, is that it's picking up a negative media environment.

Your personal finances are fine, but you keep hearing about inflation, and worse if you watch Fox News, so your overall impressions are negative.

That's surely part of it. But not all. The partisan gap is smaller tan I would've thought.

I suspect that the bigger part is that it's picking up what you might call "economic experience."

Because, right now, most people's experience of the economy sucks, no matter how their personal finances are.

Part of that is prices. It hurts to go to the gas station and see those gallon prices. It's a bad experience people have weekly, or more.

But beyond that, every other economic interaction is worse.

Everyone is masked, or maybe not enough people are masked. Maybe your finances are fine, but you can't go eat in a restaurant, or go to the gym, because it's unsafe.

Workers and customers alike are scared and tetchy.

Travel sucks.

School is patchy.

The economy feels bad right now. It's better if you have more money, of course. But it still feels bad.

This is all kind of obvious. The pandemic is bad! But I think a lot of economic punditry is missing economic experience because we don't really measure it.

We measure GDP and inflation and wages and employment, but our measures of experience are cruder and rarer. Things like consumer confidence and buying climate kind of get at it, but not exactly, and we pay less attention to them.

And that gets to the political challenge of the economy for the Biden administration this year.

It's not just that they need to get inflation under control. They need people's experience of the economy to improve, or the frustrations will get taken out on them in the midterms.

And, maddeningly, they only control some of that. It's not up to them whether a new variant hits in six months.

And I should say: There's much more on all these dynamics in my podcast with @chrislhayes nytimes.com/2022/01/11/opi…

Also, you can play around with the survey data here: langerresearch.com/category/cci/