Why aren’t Americans jumping for joy about the economy? Pundits have come up with the answer: Americans just don’t get how good they’ve got it.

“You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid,” Paul Krugman recently wrote while pondering this question, before quickly suggesting this was the case anyway. There are “huge gaps between what people say about the economy and both what the data says and what they say about their own experience,” Krugman remarked, blaming partisanship, the media, and economists’ predictions for this gulf in perception.

He’s far from the only one. In a piece titled “America Is Doing Just Fine,” millionaire MSNBC talking head Joe Scarborough pointed to macroeconomic figures like GDP growth and the size of California’s economy to insist that “your country is doing pretty damn well.” In a recent appearance on Stephanie Ruhle’s show on the network, economist Justin Wolfers assured viewers that it was all just the warping effect of partisanship and that Americans simply “tell themselves stories that are completely at odds with reality.”