> Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling. Does that mean things aren’t getting better or does it mean expectations are rising? i'm not sure the two

> Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling. Does that mean things aren’t getting better or does it mean expectations are rising? i'm not sure the two can actually be decoupled. why do people work? as a means to fulfill their needs and desires. how do you measure if a person's needs and desires are being fulfilled? you can try to ground economic measurements in something like Maslow's hierarchy, but you can't escape that a person's sentiment is real. give a person shelter, but in such a way that they feel it could be taken away from them at any moment (e.g. "living paycheck-to-paycheck"), and you've only sort of fulfilled their base needs. give a person the exact same shelter but in such a way that they feel secure in it, and it's hard to argue that's not meaningfully better. so whatever macro measurements you're using, if your goal is for them to reflect anything real to the individual, they ought to have some correlation to sentiment. "household savings" and "job openings" often do proxy the difference between being secure v.s. insecure in your housing. but, speaking to the article, worries you'll see captured and reinforced by the news such as "the other half of the country wants to take away my healthcare" or "the other half of the country wants to obsolete my coal/oil/manufacturing job" proxy these same feelings of in/security, but are likely not captured by any formal measurement... except "sentiment". so if these sentiments aren't proxied by your "things are getting better" measurement, then yes, it would mean that things aren't getting as better as your measurement claims.