On TV yesterday, I saw a reporter talking to a group of people who said they were unhappy with the economy. She said to one woman, “Inflation is coming down, wages are up, unemployment is down, and the stock market is doing well.” The woman replied, “Well, I would disagree with that.”
That sums up the facts-don’t-matter situation we have in this country today and is emblematic of H.L. Mencken’s famous line: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
Seems that America doing well, based on the metrics, doesn't factor in the elusiveness of the "American Dream". It's one thing to disagree with facts. It's another to find the facts to be of little or no comfort. Telling a person that things are going well when they're personally in a struggle to, for example, stay housed, is not the basis of a productive conversation. Maybe reporters would learn more through using open-ended questions. People don't feel statistics.
@Cynicholic It wasn’t a confrontational interview - just a conversation between the people and the reporter. The reporter merely brought up encouraging trends in the economy to see if the folks at the table were experiencing them. What she got was a woman who denied the positive things were even happening. And these were not homeless, struggling-to-make-ends -meet people. Just sitting at a restaurant grousing about the price of eggs.