Via Matt Yglesias, a new USA Today/Gallup poll finds that the richer you are, the more likely you are to think that the economy is doing great:

The wording is pretty suspect on this one, I think; there’s still a huge output gap in the American economy that won’t be closed for years or decades as a result of the recent recession, but the economy is technically growing. And thank god for that. As a result, I’m not entirely sure how valid the findings in this particular poll are.

Regardless, these findings are pretty much in-line with what I said in August of ‘10: our most persistent indications of what the world is like comes from the people and establishments in our everyday lives, and so people in general cannot help but rely on that information when asked how they think the nation, or the world as a whole is doing. We all fall victim to this every day, and it is imperative that we force ourselves to recognize just how unrepresentative of reality that information truly is.

On a side note, apologies for not posting at all in the past few months. I’ve been hesitant to do so since I haven’t really had the time to commit to longer, more analytical posts; I think I’ve just decided to go with somewhat shorter, more frequent posts.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a side project called LL Animu Recommendations, mostly. Been learning Ruby on Rails and re-learning algorithms from the ground up at the same time. It’s an attempt at making anime recommendations simple and fast by using a Danbooru-style tag system and user voting to filter out what you’re likely to enjoy. If you’re interested, give it a look! The code is up on Github, as well.