Where Did 7 Million Workers Go?

The U.S. economy right now is a little bit like Dune.

Not Frank Herbert’s magisterial sci-fi epic novel, or Denis Villeneuve’s new and reportedly sumptuous film adaptation. I mean David Lynch’s infamously bewildering 1984 movie version, which is remembered mostly for being a semi-glorious mess. Like that space oddity, today’s economy is too strange to neatly categorize as “clearly great” or “obviously terrible.” You keep waiting for it to just be normal. But it stays weird—big economic indicators point in conflicting directions—so you have to accept that nothing is going to make sense for a while, and maybe it’ll be okay.

Americans are buying more stuff than ever before. That’s good. But because of supply constraints, it can feel like there’s a painful . That’s bad. Economic growth is , but the president’s approval rating on, which is a historically odd juxtaposition. Businesses everywhere are struggling to fill jobs, which sounds bad, but employer pain is workers’ gain, and , which is wonderful. But because prices are rising too, inflation-adjusted hourly-wage growth actually , which is not wonderful.