Neil Irwin Gets Consumer Confidence Right

Neil Irwin hit on one of my pet peeves last week, the meaninglessness of the consumer confidence indices. Big upswings or drops in these indices often make headlines, however they bear almost no relationship to actual movements in consumption. 

The story, or at least my story, is that people are largely answering based on what they hear in the news. If the papers are filled with stories of doom and gloom based on a budget standoff, looming debt default or some other bad story, people giv...