The banks know it. Why don’t more Americans? Those folkloric man-on-the-street (or in a rural diner) puff pieces are as infuriating as they are uninformative. They do, however, reinforce false, often minority, impressions of what’s really happening in the country, Timothy Noah argues in The New Republic. Misinforming tales abound (his mock example): “People Believe Stuff That Isn’t True, but They Feel Like It Is True, So Let’s Give Them a Hearing Because We Don’t Want to Seem Elitist.” Outlets such as The Wall Street Journal regularly hand Joe Everyman a megaphone and let him expound on microchips in vaccines, schoolteachers “trying to turn your children gay or trans,” and the crappy Biden economy that isn’t. Given a platform, uninformed views steer public opinion by making the wrong seem right. Polling later confirms that people think the economy sucks. It doesn’t. Ask Morgan Stanley. The firm was “obliged to nearly quadruple its previous estimate of gross domestic product growth for the first six months of 2023” and double “its GDP growth prediction for October–December 2023, to 1.3 percent, and predicts 1.4 percent growth in 2024.” “We have now reached the point where the Wall Street titans on whom Biden wishes to raise taxes maintain a higher opinion of Biden’s economic stewardship than the public at large,” Noah wryly observes. But you won’t find that out by asking the red-hat in the diner. How voters feel about the economy has more to do with partisanship than reality, Noah writes. Raw public…