Analysis | Americans are more content with themselves than with America

Last year, The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson summarized the national mood succinctly: Everything is terrible, but I’m fine.

He was reacting to research published by the Federal Reserve evaluating how confident Americans were about their own finances and the nation’s more broadly. What the data suggested was that there was a gap, that while three-quarters of Americans said their own finances were doing all right, only a quarter said the national economy was doing well.