It looks as if the conventional wisdom is wrong. For years, this has been that elections are determined by the economy - as embodied in the slogan, "it's the economy, stupid." This election, however, looks like being an exception.

Ms May seems to be getting her wish that the election should be about Brexit, even though the move will probably impoverish us. Years of stagnating real wages have not produced a backlash against the government. Voters support immigration controls even though these are bad for the economy*. And the question of how to raise productivity - which many economists would regard as the biggest economic issue - hasn't so far been on the election agenda at all.

This raises the question: why doesn't the economy seem to matter in this election?

We can discount the possibility that voters are so far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs that they are now above material concerns.

What, then, are the explanations?

One possibility is that many retired voters needn't worry about the economy because they are protected from the consequences of weak growth by the triple lock. Yes, I'm a supporter of this, but perhaps one drawback of it is that it reduces solidarity between working and retired people.

Another possibility is that there's wisdom in crowds. Maybe voters instinctively grasp that there's not much governments can do to raise trend growth. I'm not sure about this, though. There are many policies which might increase productivity and which wouldn't hurt us even if they don't, such as better early years education. Maybe there's an analogy here with broad-spectrum antibiotics: if you don't know the precise problem, throwing a range of solutions at it might work.

Thirdly, Labour has failed to put economic issues on the agenda. I'm not sure this is wholly Corbyn's fault - although his perceived incompetence no doubt tarnishes Labour's reputation generally. Remember that he won the leadership election because his more centrist opponents were devoid of ideas. John McDonnell has certainly been thinking along the right lines, but Labour policy has so far been a work in progress rather a polished proposal.

A fourth explanation is media bias. I'm not thinking here of overt bias against Corbyn: as Jonathan Freedland points out, Corbyn is unpopular even with people who avoid the MSM. Not even am I thinking about moronic mediamacro. Instead, I'm thinking of a different type of bias. Journalists report upon what people do. But this means they focus upon agency more than upon emergent processes: they talk to "senior sources" rather than analyse impersonal social phenomena. This distorts what gets covered: fiscal policy and Brexit talk gets attention whereas stagnant productivity gets less.

There is, though, another possibility - endogenous (pdf) preferences. Rather than protest against stagnation, voters have resigned themselves to it - perhaps in a similar way to how they resign themselves to inequality. This, however, poses the question asked by Jon Elster:

Why should individual want satisfaction be the criterion of justice and social choice when individual wants themselves may be shaped by a process that pre-empts the choice? (Sour Grapes, p109)

At a time when the "will of the people" cannot be doubted, this question is, however, off the agenda.

* Yes, most voters say they wouldn't pay anything to reduce immigration, but the juxtaposition of this with the popularity of immigration controls only shows how little people have thought about the economics of immigration.