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IIRC it is similar to the unemployment rate, where if you completely drop off the map for some time you are no longer counted at all.

The way the government counts in houses people is to count the number of people in shelters, transitional housing, and safe houses on a single night in January. Every other year the local authority also counts the number of unsheltered people by driving around and making tally essentially. So while the official count definitely underestimates the total unhoused population, it is still a good indicator if the number of unhoused people is growing and by roughly how much.

The word "gaslighting" gets used a lot but the closest I have ever felt to being actually gaslit in a political sense is having dozens upon dozens of headlines beamed at me being like "Well, the economy is obviously doing great, so I wonder why people don't believe it? I wonder what psychological effect is making people believe that things aren't amazing?" Just to directly name a couple, here's FAIR's reporting over the last couple years:

January 2024: Media Obsession With Inflation Has Manufactured Discontent:

At the time, the misery index, a rough gauge of societal suffering that sums inflation and unemployment, clocked in at nearly 12%. Today, the same index sits around 7%. If the fall of 1984 was morning, we’re well into the day. The dark, turbulent night is not only behind us; it’s been over for a while. That’s not how most of the American public seems to feel, though. People continue to rate the economy stunningly poorly, given its performance of late. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, for instance, most recently registered 61.3, versus 100.9 during “Morning in America.” In other words, consumer sentiment is currently 39% lower than it was at a time when the misery index was 41% higher.

The gap between consumer sentiment and economic performance has sparked extensive pontification online, with a variety of reasons being proposed for the disconnect. Arguments have been made for everything from increases in grocery prices (Atlantic, 12/21/23), to real wage declines during much of 2021 and 2022 (Vox, 8/10/23), to social media misinformation (Washington Post, 11/24/23), to partisan polarization (CBS, 8/14/23), to lagging perceptions and a desire for outright deflation (Wall Street Journal, 10/18/23).

At the end of the day, there’s probably some truth to all of these ideas. But there’s another fundamental cause of economic discontent that should be getting more attention: corporate media’s single-minded obsession with inflation, which has left the public with an objectively inaccurate view of the economy.

November 2024: It’s the Economic Reporting, Stupid

Conservative media, unsurprisingly, appears to be a major culprit in the miseducation of the American public, with people whose primary media source is conservative media registering lower familiarity with reality than those who stuck mainly to other media sources. (Reliance on social media, too, was associated with less knowledge of basic facts.) But even among those who primarily get their news from the more general category of cable/national newspapers, a third didn’t realize that inflation had declined over the past year. Voters’ lack of knowledge, therefore, cannot simply be laid at the feet of the conservative press. Corporate outlets more broadly must share the blame.

Another offending piece appeared recently in the Atlantic (11/11/24). There, staff writer Annie Lowrey made the case that the cost-of-living crisis, and the Democrats’ inability to tackle it, explains the election results. Curiously, the media’s role in distracting the public from the remarkable achievements of macroeconomic policy during Biden’s tenure in office went unmentioned.

This is not to say that Lowrey and others who have made similar arguments don’t have a point that there are real issues facing the American public. For such a wealthy country, the US has obscenely high poverty, internationally aberrant levels of inequality, and a notoriously ramshackle welfare state. Partially out of sheer necessity, the US welfare state was substantially boosted during the pandemic, and the unwinding of this enhanced safety net after 2021 must have had some effect on Americans’ perceptions of the economy and their own economic standing. Real disposable income, for example, spiked in 2021 due to temporary measures like stimulus checks, but then fell back to the pre-pandemic trend of growth, which may have felt like a loss to some.

Like, you actual motherfuckers. "Well, everybody is reporting in polling that their lives fucking suck under Biden, but these objective, god-given, absolutely infallible inflation numbers (that exclude everything that the average person is vulnerable to) and these employment figures (which, as anybody who works as a gig worker or similarly vulnerable positions, know are hilariously incorrect) are all so good! We can't blame these poor, idiotic, easily misled, slack-jawed rubes that make up our population - no no no, that would be mean, and we are a kind and benevolent group of liberal analysts - we have the magnanimity to blame the media for misinforming them, instead." Fuck off.