People are unhappy with President Joe Biden’s economy, and they are getting more unhappy every day. Many commentators believe people should be happy with Bidenomics because inflation is lower now than a year ago.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes has made a more nuanced criticism of the public: It’s OK to be unhappy with three years of extraordinary inflation, but we should all be less unhappy today because inflation is getting closer to normal.

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Hayes is positing that consumers ought to think like economists, but he is also missing the way we experience inflation and other hardships.

Here’s one way to understand it: If something bad is happening (inflation above 3.5%), the longer it goes on, the more unhappy we get, even if that bad thing gets slightly less bad over time. It makes people especially mad if experts promised us the bad thing was “transitory.”

The consumer price index for all items is 3.7% higher than a year ago. Yes, that’s a lower rate of increase than we saw in 2022, but it’s still extraordinarily high compared to the past 15 years.

This month’s year-over-year inflation figure, 3.7%, is higher than any month in former President Barack Obama’s second term or Donald Trump’s presidency.

So the problem isn’t simply that prices are still high. It’s that prices are high and rising faster than normal. Prices are high, and inflation is still high!

To put it in mathematical terms: Prices are very high, and the first derivative of prices (inflation) is abnormally high. Hayes argues that dissatisfaction with Bidenomics should be waning because the second derivative of prices is negative.

Imagine your city typically had one carjacking per week, but something happened in 2020 that drove that number up to 10 carjackings per week. If, after three years of this crime spree, the rate had fallen to five carjackings per week, you might reasonably be growing in your dissatisfaction because you’ve now lived through three years of abnormally high carjackings.

Why is Pope Francis issuing a more dire warning about climate change when global greenhouse gas emissions grew by only 0.9%? That’s a much smaller increase than the 6% increase in 2021. The rate of growth is slowing!

But bad things — whether it’s climate change, crime waves, or extraordinary inflation — are bad, and people get sick of living through badness after a while.

Some economists will zoom way in to make the argument that current inflation is no longer extraordinary. If you exclude some extra-volatile goods and look at a three-month time window, inflation is a bit above 2%, which is basically normal.

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These economists are arguing that if you use the right inflation measure and the right time window, things are getting better. I think they may be right as a forward-looking matter: If next fall, year-over-year inflation is around 2%, Bidenomics will be more popular.

But right now, consumers feel the pain, and they are right to blame Biden’s policies for that pain.