A 60-Year Measure of Mattering
We encounter charts, graphics, and statistics, and rather than interrogating them, we fold them into what we already believe, rarely stopping to ask what's actually being measured, or whether the official interpretation is the only one. We see what we see and move on.
I understand the impulse. Most data is exactly what it claims to be, and folding is faster than thinking. Most of the time nothing is lost.
Most of the time.
The gap, between what something officially measures and what it actually records, is my contrarian sweet spot. What I call narrative empiricism. Real data, reliably collected, grounded in actual measurement, that's the empiricism. The story that data tells about the world we're living in, and the one taking shape whether we're watching or not, that's the narrative. Good evidence, interrogated rather than filed, stops being measurement and starts being meaning.
The University of Michigan Survey of Consumers is one of my favorite recurring datasets, and one I thought I understood until I actually stopped to look. Its centerpiece is the Index of Consumer Sentiment, which measures how Americans feel about their personal finances and near-term economic expectations. The premise is simple. How people feel about their present circumstances and where they think things are heading shapes what they do with their money. Optimism opens wallets. Pessimism closes them.
What follows is sixty years of American sentiment in a single chart that I promise is worth more than a quick glance.
Source: University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment, 1970 to present. Measured quarterly. Indexed to 100, representing baseline American consumer confidence in Q1 1966. Shaded areas indicate U.S. recessions.
I sat with this chart for a very long time. Staring at it, interrogating it, asking myself what it actually says about the sixty-year arc from 1970 to today. Why the line goes up and down is self-evident. The questions worth losing sleep over are another matter entirely.
What does 1977's oil-shocked, post-Watergate America tell us that Reagan's 1984 "Morning in America" flatly rewrote, and what do both have to say to 1999's dot-com peak, still the highest reading this index has ever recorded? The highest reading in sixty years was a quarter century ago. Just saying. What do the sentiment collapses of 1980 and 2008, both accompanied by declared recessions (gray bars on this chart), share with a current reading that has reached the same historic lows without one? And because I can never leave well enough alone, what does the right edge of this chart, sitting where it's sitting right now, tell us about where we are, where we're going, and most importantly, where the future is taking our children?
Sit with it long enough and it stops being a chart.
I no longer consider this chart a record of how Americans feel about their finances. I think it's a record of the American soul. And more precisely, a 60-year measure of mattering, whether Americans believe their future belongs to them, or whether it's being decided by others in rooms they'll never be invited into.
I'm working on a piece that chases this new vista much further than I expected when I sat down this morning. Before I do, I want to know what you see. What does the line tell you? What does it make you feel? What does it say about the world your children are inheriting? Email me at david@beew.me.