At our current moment there are dueling theories about why everyone feels so badly about the economy. Nate Cohn draws a straight line between perceptions of the economy and confidence in the Biden administration. Paul Krugman claims that the media, especially right-wing media, is over-indexing on stories about inflation.

Either way, we’re in a moment that illustrates the difficulty of expectation setting and the power of narrative—and especially the narrative reinforcement mechanisms inherent to our current media ecosystem.

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