In the NY Post, Kyle Smith discusses the gap between the public's perception of how the economy currently is and how they personally are doing:
Take people's views on the economy. Pew is clever enough to divide this subject into two questions: how are you, personally, doing? And how do you think your country is doing?
The difference between how people answer these two questions is the Perception Gap. How you believe you and your family are doing is based on direct, personal experience. When it comes to you-ism, you are a leading authority.
How people respond when asked about how their country is doing economically steers them into abstraction, into thinking about things they have no direct knowledge of. How do you know what is going on in manufacturing if you've never seen the inside of a factory? You picked it up from your local anchorwoman Debbie Downer. Or her Action News co-host, Nat Nabob. Or maybe it was Paul Krugman.
A (true) sentence that has never been uttered on any newscast this year: "American employment is at 94.5 percent, above the postwar average, and the latest available statistics say the economy is still growing." Twenty percent of Americans say the U.S. economy is doing well. That's hearsay. Seventy-one percent say they, personally, are doing well. That's their expert testimony. The Perception Gap of Americans on the economy is 51 points.
