Economic pessimism with a funnel

Economist and former minister Alberto Garzón shared an interesting chart, produced by Oxford Economics. It showed the evolution of consumer confidence in the Spanish economy over the years. A blue line represented perceptions of the overall economic situation, while a red line indicated assessments of the household's own economic performance. Both lines were correlated and tended to overlap. However, from 2020 onward, confidence in the overall economy plummeted, while the line for household confidence remained above zero, at healthy levels. Garzón attributed this—and I think he's right—to the narrative war waged by Pedro Sánchez: the mainstream media has insisted so much on the apocalyptic vision that the public ends up repeating that the economy is doing badly, even if their personal situation is healthy. And that's why we should reflect on whether it makes sense to ask the general population about the state of the macroeconomy, when the vast majority of citizens lack the training to evaluate it and, therefore, simply repeat the arguments aired on talk shows.

Garzón provided a second graph reflecting the perception of the economic situation itself, segmented by voting intention: those who opt for Vox or "The Party's Over" are the ones who report a worse situation at home. It could be, of course, that those who are truly struggling the most react by grasping at straws offered by the new parties, however ultramontane or outlandish they may be. But it seems more plausible that they are simply the people who have been most deeply affected, to the core, by the constant hyperbolic narrative of extreme populism. When we talk about the responsibility of the media, we tend to focus on the individual consequences. But it would be good to start talking about the collective ones.