(Earlier this week Commonweal magazine published a lengthy essay by me about neoliberalism and Christianity. You can find it here or in the print magazine.)

Among the political controversies of the last few years in the U.S., perhaps none has been more significant in election outcomes than the state of “the economy.” We continue to experience, as we did in the 2024 election year, what has been called a “vibecession,” in which Americans’ sentiments about the economy have diverged from economic data.

When these diverge, which do we consult? On the one hand, it’s clear that non-economic factors influence consumers’ reported sentiment: after elections you see an immediate partisan flip in how people report on the economy, well before new policies can have changed anything or even happened. Individual consumers (and it is also worth thinking about how “consumer sentiment” prioritizes the consumption role in economic perception) might also base their perceptions on specific indicators that could be unhelpful or outliers, like eggs, or gasoline, even if other factors are improving.

On the other hand, an economy no one thinks is good is not a good one. Data can’t capture everything. Which data to listen to, most importantly, is its own difficult question. There’s a lot to be said about all of this— plenty to critique in the whole framing— but today I have exactly one point to make about this argument. “The economy” is itself an aggregation of subjective preferences. And the way they are aggregated might offer us a way out of a binary choice on data or sentiment— and a way to explain both.

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The economy doesn’t exist outside of social relations and subjective value. To measure how the economy is doing we ultimately need to rely on individuals’ subjective preferences— value is a social property, not something you can measure. But we can’t just ask individuals what prices should be: most of us would give an answer convenient for us, even if they weren’t trying. We don’t have the information to do otherwise. (We could perhaps devise institutions to aggregate this information and have some influence over costs— I’m not saying that’s impossible— but for the most part we don’t, currently).