Happy New Year everyone. This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hana Rosen.

So I'm always interested when people fall under collective delusion.

Like people who say crime in cities is out of control that they're way less safe than they

used to be, when literally any statistic will show you the crime in both cities

has been on a steady decline since the 70s.

Well, we are under another collective delusion now.

I'm talking about the bad vibes economy, sometimes known on

Tik-Toc as the silent depression. It is a genuine and genuinely

unprecedented mystery because the economy by many standard measures is good.

But according to poll after poll, including a poll done by the Atlantic, most Americans are feeling pessimistic

about the economy. Is the economy good and we irrational beings are the problem, or is the economy actually bad in some ways that we're not seeing and not measuring

and we should just trust our feelings. That's the mystery and to help us understand

it we have Atlantic Senior Editor Gylod Edelman, who focuses on economics coverage.

Hi Gylod.

Hello.

Okay, Gylod.

There is this persistent perception reality gap in the economy now. Can you just lay it out?

So until the last few years, Americans perceptions of the economy basically tracked what was going on in the economy according to key measurements.

So the economy would do better, people's subjective experience of the economy would go up,

the economy would do worse, people would tell you it's doing worse.

Now something seems to have changed starting with the pandemic, where when the pandemic hits,

the economy tanks, people lose their jobs, you know, productivity grinds to a halt.

...