Perception of how good this economy is also depends on your age - If you’re in your 20’s or early 30’s, the only other economy you really have to compare against this one was Clinton’s, and that was a period of the biggest change and biggest asset bubble we’ve seen in the last century. It’s an impossible standard to maintain over time, and compared to it this economy might just look ho-hum.
Those of us in our 40’s and older remember earlier times. I started working in the late 1970’s, and let me tell you, this economy is awesome compared to then. When I entered the work force, unemployement was around 10%. Today it’s less than 5%. Interest rates were pushing 20%. People had mortages that didn’t even pay all the interest - their equity was going down each month.
We bought our first house in 1991. It proceeded to lose 20% of its value over the next five years. We sold it five years after that, at which point its value had not quite recovered. So our house stayed flat in value for 10 years.
But in any economy, you can find good and bad things. The good part about high interest is that the people who were saving their money were doing fine. When real estate crashed, it became more affordable for young people. Now the complaint is that people can no longer afford our city, because the price of real estate has rapidly outstripped increases in the price of labor.
In my city, we have effectively 0% unemployment. Anyone who wants a job can take his pick. 7-11 is offering $1000 signing bonuses and paying $9/hr. Restaraunts are closing early because they lack staff. That creates its own problems. Everywhere you go these days there are lineups. Contractor work is shoddier because they’re all overbooked and training new workers all the time. The cost of real estate is forcing the construction of high-density condos, which is stressing an infrastructure that wasn’t build to handle high-density residential.
So you can always find good and bad things to say. That’s why we try to standardize on a few aggregate measures when comparing economies, and it’s also why partisans on both sides always try to subvert, ignore, or critisize those measures when trying to score political points. Unemployment’s low? Well, it’s not ‘real’ unemployment. The ‘hidden’ unemployment figures are much worse. Real estate values are going up? That just makes people borrow against their houses and skew all the other measures - it’s all an illusion.
But ask yourself - would the same people criticising housing prices today shut up if housing prices had stayed flat or gone down? Or would they then be arguing that the economy is terrible because real estate is flat? If unemployment hit 4% under a Democratic president, would they still be complaining that the number is bogus?