Income fell in 2020 as the pandemic hit. Even if living standards were rising again, positive trends would have to continue before people began to register satisfaction. But living standards aren’t yet rising, anyway.

Wages and benefits have been moving up smartly, but only in nominal terms. As the economics researchers Jason Furman and Wilson Powell III pointed out in an analysis for the Petersen Institute, total compensation is 0.6% below its December 2019 level after adjusting for inflation. Irwin wrote that economists see rising wages and rising prices as “two sides of the same coin.” For most people, though, the net effect in today’s economy is that the coins they are getting don’t go as far.

It stands to reason that changes in the real value of wages would have a bigger effect on public sentiment than changes in the unemployment rate. The number of people paying more at the pump and the grocery store is much larger than the number of people who have gotten new jobs.