A plethora of mostly interesting data points about how people all over the world see their national economy can be found in this Pew survey released yesterday.
While emerging market nations are far more optimistic about the future with a stunning 80 percent of Chinese saying that conditions will improve over the next year, we ‘Mericans seem to be sharply divided in how we see things as shown to the right.
It’s no surprise that we lead all advanced economies in optimism since, we are a pretty sanguine bunch for the most part. Only Japan and South Korea come close to the 44 percent of Americans who see a better economy ahead.
But, it is the U.S. pessimists that make us standout as a full one-third of us think things will get worse.
This leaves only 22 percent in the middle, roughly corresponding (and not coincidentally, I’m guessing) to the share of independent voters in the country.
Only Greece has fewer people thinking that things will stay the same and, given their current condition, there probably isn’t much difference between no change and worse, the latter response registering 64 percent.
This chart likely says more about our politics than our economy.
