If you’re an economic technocrat staring at a dashboard of official indicators of how the United States is doing, these look like pretty good times.

The unemployment rate is low. Gross domestic product is growing. Wages are rising a good bit faster than inflation, which is very modest. These may not be all-out boom times, but as far as economic policy goes, it looks like a job well done.

Your countrymen, it is amply clear, do not agree.

In polls, nearly twice as many Americans viewed the nation as being on the wrong track as the right one, and as recently as early November many more people saw the economy as getting worse than getting better. Those economic assessments have flipped since the election, driven by Republicans apparently feeling better about things, mainly because President Trump has promised to change the country’s direction.

Let’s consider Mr. Trump’s rise, the anti-establishment energy behind the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, and parallels in the politics of Britain and other advanced nations. It takes no grand leap of logic to conclude that something is rotten in many people’s economic lives that hasn’t been picked up by the headline data that government statistical agencies publish every month.