If you want to understand what's wrong with the American economy and how we approach it, just look back at the financial extremes of this week.

All week, the US has been focused on the Twitter IPO as if it were the Marshall Plan of finance, as if this one money-splashing event had long-term implications for capitalist peace. Silicon Valley millionaires gossiped about the company's decadent $30bn valuation and started dreaming of IPOs that would make them rich for working at unprofitable-but-innovative companies too.

Meanwhile, in the real America – the one where you can't call Uber to take you to a launch party – people are dropping out of the workforce, the recovery is weakening and early cuts in food stamps are already slamming the poor.

That real America is the one that's not getting much attention. Part of the reason is that it's not glamorous, and it doesn't have any startup-founder creation myths. Another part of the reason is to be found in misleading economic statistics. Economic indicators keep supporting the idea of a "weak recovery", and for some reason experts keep focusing on the recovery part and not the weakness.

That continues to provide an excuse for many in Congress to keep ignoring the signs of economic distress sweeping in the country and engage in debt-ceiling antics that have become a chronic political problem. (The next time this particular circus is visiting town is in January.)

These are confusing economic times, true. If you look at the economic statistics in the shallowest way, they indicate that things are getting better and help is on the way.

It is not. That's why it's worth a deeper look.

First, the damned lies. Several economic indicators have suddenly taken a positive turn, for no discernible reason. It's smart to be skeptical about them.

US GDP, for instance, jumped to 2.8% growth in the third quarter. Personal spending and savings have both risen. Today's jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 200,000 jobs added.

Let's start with today's jobs report. That report usually provides a way to get some insight into the health of the economy, and it has been full of contradictions. The unemployment rate has been steadily dropping for years, but the employment situation in the US is still dismal. The October jobs report, released on Friday, seems at first glance lavishly optimistic: 204,000 jobs added in October, even amid the dismally pointless government shutdown. After more numbers were crunched, another 60,000 jobs were added in August and September.

Great, right?

Actually, it's not.

What only a practiced observer would see is that people are dropping out of the workforce at an intensity not seen since March 1978 – the dark years of oil shortages and stagflation. That was the last time that the size of the US labor force was so low. Only 62.8% of the U.S. is actually working. That means that one-third of the labor force are not using their abilities to contribute to the economy or to support themselves.

We can see evidence of that in other statistics that measure income inequality.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities this week took a hard look at measures of income inequality. Those statistics have intensified in their warning signals since 1970 and now that the economy is weakened, that inequality is more pronounced than ever. The inequality gap is widening, and that's making it harder to keep the core of the US economy – the middle and working classes – financially stable. That's what we see in the jobs numbers, and what we see in the growing poverty rate.

Here's the upshot of the CBPP's findings: even when the economy is growing, not everyone in America benefits, as they once used to. People who are already rich get a greater benefit from economic growth. A rising tide, in short, does not lift all boats – or even most of them.

We can see this on a micro level all the time. The Twitter IPO's financial impact – for all of its splashy billions – will barely even reach past the golden gate of San Francisco.

More than 40 million Americans are on food stamps; a similar number were 'food insecure' in 2012. Photograph: Leigh Vogel/Corbis Photograph: Leigh Vogel/ Leigh Vogel/Corbis

The scariest economic metric measuring inequality – and how bad the economy is – is food. It's a staple, a matter of survival, and tens of millions of Americans can't afford to buy it. There are 42 million Americans on food stamps. The US Department of Agriculture found that 14.5% of all Americans – roughly that same number on food stamps, 42 million people – were "food insecure" at some point in 2012, meaning they lacked access to healthy and affordable meals.

The cost of food is small in this country – thanks to America's high food production – and yet in this economy, people can't even afford that. One food stamp recipient "already spent the $33 he received in November", the New York Times reports, and he has resolved not to buy any meat. The Senate and the House are both mulling even deeper cuts to food stamps.

So when the jobs numbers come out, and they look positive, they hide a larger truth. There is rot underneath the glossy surface of our improving economy. That rot comes from income inequality, and the fact that poor Americans are starving and ignored while rich Americans are celebrated for their often accidental billions.