Trump Says the Country Is ‘Dying.’ The Data Say Otherwise.

Narratives of national decline have intensified in recent years. Most prominent, of course, is Donald Trump’s vow to “make America great again,” in response to what he has called “a nation that is dying.” But there is also doomsaying on the far left, which sees a “late-stage capitalist hellscape” (to quote the journalist Taylor Lorenz) and is often resigned to voting in protest for a long-shot candidate or sitting out the election altogether.

The doomers can always find ammunition in the news. News, by its very nature, consists of things that happen, and it’s easier for things to go wrong suddenly — a war, a terrorist attack, a hurricane — than to go right suddenly. When things do go right, it usually means either that nothing happens (a country remains at peace, for example) or that improvements creep up a few percentage points every year and compound over time, transforming the world by stealth.

As a result, one can get the impression that the state of the world keeps getting worse when in fact it keeps getting better.

An antidote is to look at trends. Actual data seldom tell a simple tale of disaster or triumph, but in this case, indicators of national well-being over recent decades suggest that the reports of our nation’s demise are greatly exaggerated, if not downright delusional.

To be sure, individual citizens don’t experience long-term trends in their daily lives. An unemployed voter, for example, could be forgiven for taking little comfort in rising employment numbers.

Yet overarching narratives have a big impact. Research shows that voters are typically more influenced by the state of the nation, as they understand it, than by the state of their own lives. This may seem counterintuitive but it makes sense: Their lone vote is astronomically unlikely to affect their lives, so they treat it as an act of self-expression rather than self-interest. (Political scientists call this “sociotropic” voting.) And when it comes to understanding the state of the nation, voters consistently judge it to be in worse shape than they do their own neighborhoods and themselves. (Political scientists call this the “optimism gap.”)