Really? Here are the Michigan Consumer Survey questions from 2015. data.sca.isr.umich.edu/fetchdoc.php... 1/

Do they capture what we care about, in terms of long-term economic welfare? Are you financially better off or worse off than five years ago? How are business conditions? What do you expect of inflation? How's the housing market? 2/

Is that "economic welfare" in any meaningful sense? If you have more savings than five years ago, but you're struggling to make ends meat 'cuz your kid's in college and rent's gone up, are you "financially better off"? 3/

If you think gas prices are going to decline, what's the relationship between that and economic welfare? 4/

These measures were never intended or designed to be used in the manner you are using them. They are intended to help make short-term predictions about the business cycle. That's what they were developed for. 5/

I agree the suicide rate is a very dirty measure. But it is more condign to the task of measuring welfare, the object of economics, than short-term consumer sentiment surveys. Yes. It's a bad measure! All the measures are bad! That is real life. 6/

You don't get to trump an argument because you have a measure, a very bad measure, but it is quantitative and you can find it on FRED! That is cargo cultism, not intelligence. /fin