[dbspin]

Exactly this. Not only are objective metrics difficult - our interest in and capacity to measure social phenomena, especially self reported social phenomena varies over time, and is deeply amenable to accidental or deliberate manipulation (cognitive aspects of survey methodology is a whole field). Moreover, the subjective experience of a time is impossible to convey. Many of the deepest and most personally significant aspects of everyday interpersonal life - level of community integration, personal emotional investment in ones occupation, level of creative engagement etc - are hard or impossible to measure.

To take an arbitrary example from my own life, the last recession was an incredible time in Ireland. The housing crisis that has boiled for decades diminished, cheap and free property rentals in Dublin lead to an explosion in the creative arts - including dozens of 'open access' non profit creative spaces. Mass underemployment meant that social status briefly became much more about creative engagement and sociability that wealth display. Bars became less the focus of social life, which moved to house parties and non-profit social spaces. It was a creative and social renaissance. All of this disappeared so completely during the 'recovery' that it's difficult to convey what it was like to people who weren't around to experience it.

You can point to crisis of homelessness today, a generation forced to leave with their parents into their thirties, the worsening of the Irish health service, pressures on the cost of living. But you can't easily convey the comparative misery and defensive superficiality wrought by inequality in Dublin today. You can't capture on a chart the experience of living through a beautiful communal creative moment when an entire society caught a collective breath.