Two headlines about Britain, published within days of each other. One said the economy had grown again. The other, in an American magazine, said Britain is now about as poor as Mississippi.
Same country. Both citing official numbers. Neither exactly lying.
The difference is which number you look at. GDP measures the size of the national pie. GDP per head measures your slice. And the two can move in opposite directions for years at a stretch. If the pie grows one per cent and the number of people at the table grows faster, the cook gets to announce a record while everyone leaves the table a little hungrier than last year. That part isn't a theory. It's arithmetic.
The gloomier headline is claiming the slices have been shrinking here for years. The cheerier one is pointing at the pie. I'm not going to adjudicate, partly because I can't, and partly because I've noticed how much of this argument comes down to who's doing the counting and what they wanted to find before they started.
Japan makes the same point in reverse. Its total has stalled for decades, so it gets told as a decline story. Per person, some say it's been quietly fine all along. Some say.
There's even research out this month claiming that countries with fewer young workers grow faster per working-age adult, not slower, because scarcity pushes technology to do more of the work. Fewer hands, better tools. Interesting if true. I'm in no position to check it, and if we're honest, neither are most of the people confidently sharing it. File it under interesting, not proven.
You can ask why the pie number gets all the attention anyway. I have a view. It isn't the point today.
The point is where your life actually happens. Not in the aggregate. In the slice. When the news says the country is richer and your own year says otherwise, you're not imagining it and you're not being ungrateful. An average is not a person. It never met you.
Which is, when you strip it back, the whole job here. A financial plan is per-head economics for a household of one or two. It doesn't care what the pie does. It cares whether your slice covers your life, this year and in thirty years, and what has to happen in between.
The pie will keep making headlines in both directions. Let it.