Found in the latest Paul Krugman news letter
It is called believing is seeing and goes over the way people seem to think about the economy when it is doing quite well.
He states all these reports of how people view the economy need to be with the results of people from both parties separated some of the time. At the end of his news letter was this link to this Brookings article about reported economic news getting worse.
When economic news gets worse compared to the way people feel you have a problem. Currently the reporting on the major economic issues are more negative than one would expect from the actual numbers. It does get a bit technical.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-are-americans-so-displeased-with-the-economy/?te=1&nl=paul-krugman&emc=edit_pk_20240220
Quote:
The seeming disconnect between consumer sentiment and the state of the macroeconomy has been a defining characteristic of the post-COVID economy. By most widely accepted measures, the state of the macroeconomy is historically robust: The topline unemployment rate has remained below 4% for the past two years, economic growth has been steady and recovered pandemic-era losses, and inflation has retreated to historical norms.
This apparent strength notwithstanding, various measures of household and consumer sentiment suggest a persistent dissatisfaction with the state of the economy. Less than one-quarter of registered voters surveyed by the Wall Street Journal in August 2023 answered that the economy was headed in the right direction. The Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment is roughly in-line with levels reported during the heart of the Great Recession in 2009, while the share of respondents in a Pew poll with a positive view of the economy was roughly halved between 2016 and today.
In sum, the discrepancy between the macroeconomy and household sentiment has given rise to several competing theories to explain the apparent disconnect. Our simple econometric model adds to evidence that biased sources of information play a role, and suggests that economic news has become systemically more negative beginning in 2018, with the negative bias growing over the past three years. To be clear, this analysis shows that the conditional tone of news is becoming more negative over time, but requires assumptions about how this increased negativity affects sentiment—including in particular the role of systematic bias in driving inaccurate perceptions about U.S. economic performance. While this new relationship may not explain the entire sentiment puzzle, it presents novel explanations for why consumer sentiment appears to be divorced from the macroeconomy and why survey respondents inaccurately describe the U.S. economy to be in a recession.
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