There’s been a slew of media thinkpieces with titles like “The economy is great, but voters don’t believe it” or “Crime is down, but voters don’t believe it” that try to psychoanalyze why voters aren’t happy Biden even while the experts say things are great.

The media and its experts obviously never question themselves. Self-doubt is a virtually non-existent quantity in such circles.

People aren’t happy with the economy or crime because their metrics are personal. That’s easy to dismiss as anecdotal, but quality of life is not a science experiment. It’s all too easy for experts to transform real life problems into abstractions that can then be reshuffled to meet some ideological conception of what the problem is. Out of such processes, crime becomes a social problem, mass illegal migration has its root causes in capitalism and inflation can be made to seem like a good thing.

This is usually where new school leftist technocrats catastrophically break with reality. Personal experiences are important because they reflect reality. That doesn’t always mean those experiences generalize, but ‘ask the audience’ works a whole lot better than ‘ask the experts’.

Why don’t people think that life is great? The answer is because it’s not. The answer is never because people don’t understand how great things are because they’re hearing depressing stories in the media. And yet that’s the answer the experts want us to believe.

Whom are you going to trust, the experts or your own experiences? The answer is never the one that experts like to hear.