2025 is another year where, especially in the US, the headline figures of good economic growth don't appear to fit with what the average citizen is feeling in his wallet. The phenomenon has in the past been described as "vibecession", but that isn't really a good description. Instead we are looking at a failure of economic indicators like GDP being able to describe what is actually happening. Inequality is now so high that Elon Musk's $1 trillion pay package is distorting GDP growth more than the economic reality of millions of Americans. It is perfectly possible for a country to have good GDP growth, while the majority of people get poorer, and a small elite gets much, much richer.

That is problematic in a context where globally in the long term GDP growth will at the very least slow down a lot, if not decline. That is in part due to the expected stagnation of population growth, as population growth in the past added a lot to economic growth. Another part is climate change, where GDP growth will either be hampered by climate catastrophes or by humanity having to spend global resources more frugally to avoid that catastrophe.

The political problem of economic indicators like GDP or stock market indices is that these increasingly only describe the economic situation of a rich minority, and don't reflect the economic wellbeing of the majority of the voters. That isn't to say that there is no subjectivity in the perceived economic wellbeing of the voters. Among all this discussion of economic doom and gloom on the internet are hiding realities like the enormous growth of the US self-storage industry over the past few years, because Americans have more stuff than they ever had. Even the global housing affordability crisis is a mix of a real lack of supply and a growing demand of living space per person, which has doubled over the past 50 years in the US. The fact is that a voters would be unhappy even if their situation just was stable and not improving. But today their situation is probably getting worse, our economic indicators are failing to reflect that, and there is only so much that politicians can achieve with culture wars smoke and mirrors to deflect attention from the economic reality.