In a recent conversation with Robert Reich, Jared Bernstein proposed the following,which I find kind of convincing. People answer surveys that ask "how is the economy" as though they were asked "what is the state of the world". The world is currently in, for my lifetime, an unusually scary and unstable place. I think many people feel that way. So the state of the world is making people unhappy and they get asked in surveys about "the economy" which is an abstraction so they answer about a broader abstraction, the state of the world.