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Buddy, I regret to inform you that you're seeking a Fully Generalized Solution to Disagreement, and if I or any other Mottizen had it, you'd know, if only because we'd be on stage for the Nobel Prize for Peace.
And I'm one of the people who pushed back on the narrative that the US is doing poorly. I lied, or at least was inaccurate, because the ratio of downvotes to upvotes reveals that as a pretty good scissor statement, and blackpills me harder on the quality of general epistemics than even the typical American Idiot claiming their lives and that of most other people in the States are getting harder when it comes to finances.
Oh well, I guess we all have to settle for doing our thankless jobs on the margins.
I encourage you to give the median person both slightly more and slightly less credit. Give them less credit when it comes to their ability to answer the specific question without regard to any adjacent considerations - they will express their emotions, they will express what they think advances their cause, they will express what the questioner wants to hear, they will express what the questioner doesn't want to hear, they will answer what they think the questioner is implying, they will misunderstand questions, and they will do many other things that are not just answering the fucking question. When you ask someone, "is the economy improving?", they will not be answering whether they think the annualized GDP real growth rate is 0.2% higher or lower than last year. When you ask someone, "do you think people are doing better financially?", they will not be answering with whether they suspect the median nominal savings account is higher or lower than the previous year.
On the flip side, give them slightly more credit that they are actually trying to understand the world around them and are modeling quite a few complex interactions. They probably don't know the actual numbers, they almost certainly don't care what the experts say, but they may well be picking up on actual signals related to real-world considerations that are poorly captured by metrics that are probably at least a bit shaped by Goodhart's Law. Someone that received helicopter money may in fact have more money than they did pre-helicopter while having an uneasy feeling that this isn't how wealth is actually built.
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