Ramesh Ponnuru thinks that people don't know how well the economy is doing just as they didn't know how well it was doing as it was falling into the great depression.

He is alarmingly ignorant and too arrogant to, say, glance at an encyclopedia or high school history textbook *and* he is quoting someone equally clueless

hey aren't going to change their minds about the economy, either. People have not yet adjusted their mental picture of the economy to fit today's dynamism. "The average person sees high gas prices and bankrupt airlines and GM layoffs and it doesn’t fit in their minds that this can be going on during a good economy. There are some ways in which it’s analogous to . . . say, 1880 to 1930. . . . The reality was you were creating unprecedented amounts of wealth and moving people out of agrarian poverty into what we started to call the working class. But the commentary was almost uniformly negative. People just didn’t understand it. Nobody was saying, Gosh, this is great, people are moving off the crummy farms and into cities."

I guess maybe the key point is that he means up to January 1 1930 at which point the depression was inevitable but people didn't know. Ponnuru seems to think that people in the 1920s thought the economy was going poorly. I am really shocked at such ignorance.

Also I got there via Atrios and TBogg and neither found the odd view of the US economy in the 20s and in 1930 (or on January 1 1930 if you insist) remarkable.
Is this par for the course for the corner ? I'm certainly not going to waste my time and raise my blood pressure checking.