How economic indicators and sentiment diverged after the pandemic

Economic indicators are statistics about economic activity that help people assess how the economy is doing and predict how it may perform in the future. How can economic measures and people's feelings about the economy tell different stories, and what can that difference help us understand? The lessons consider how measured economic conditions and lived sentiment relate, and why their relationship matters.

2 articles, 1 video, 1 book · about 20 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   economic indicators · Wikipedia · 7 min read

   Coincident indicators change at approximately the same time as the whole economy, providing information about its current state. A coincident index may be used to identify, after the fact, the dates of peaks and troughs in the business cycle. Local governments often need to project future tax revenues. San Francisco uses the price of a one-bedroom apartment on Craigslist, weekend subway ridership numbers, parking garage usage, and monthly reports on passenger landings at the city's airport as economic indicators.

2. Read
   

   Complacency in the U.S. Economy - A Wealth of Common Sense · A Wealth of Common Sense · 5 min read

   Economic data and how people feel are in a weird place: objectively, the U.S. economy has been strong for some time, though things could get worse any day now.

3. Watch
   

   Limitations of GDP | Economic indicators and the business cycle | AP Macroeconomics | Khan Academy · YouTube · 8 min watch

   GDP is the most commonly used measure of output, but it leaves some things out.

4. Book
   

   Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything · Bookshop.org

   Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner argues that economics is, at its roots, the study of incentives, and describes using data mining and detailed analysis of students' answers to infer teacher cheating.

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