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The problem with this kind of argument is that it presupposes that economic sentiment very suddenly reflects all these sophisticated (and decidedly liberal-leaning) evaluations of policy and technology, which has NEVER BEEN THE CASE BEFORE.

If people were incorporating factors like "The seeming political dysfunction of the country" and "Future industrial trends" and "Our ability to solve problems" into their assessments of the economy, then you'd expect sentiment to vary wildly throughout modern history. It doesn't.

Instead, what has happened is that economic sentiment pretty closely tracked a small handful of factors: unemployment, wage growth, inflation, basically. You didn't need to incorporate other variables to predict how the public would feel. And then suddenly THAT STOPPED WORKING.

What's more, those original variables STILL ARE PARTIALLY PREDICTIVE - when employment goes up and inflation goes down, sentiment improves. But what we have now, alongside that, is a large and consistently growing tendency towards negative sentiment, coming from... well, no one knows.

It doesn't seem to be COVID - it's just been getting worse nonstop since 2021. It doesn't seem to reflect dislike of Trump - it happened under Biden and continued uninterrupted when the presidency flipped. It's like there's endlessly growing pessimism, detached from politics or real events.

Essentially there was a “social contract” that appeared to reward participation in the economy. Whether that was ever true we can debate, but there were policy mechanisms and conditions (e.g., unions) that directionally supported this. They are long gone. "K-shaped" system rewards assets over labor.

On top of K-shaped Plutonomy most of life's necessities are dominated by extractive exchanges. Subscriptions whose prices change suddenly, dynamic pricing, draconian employers. This is not a sudden change, but we're approaching what feels like the breaking point of this transition.