The economy is complicated and those high-level indexes are gross simplifications of a mass of complexity, but they're not entirely unrelated to whether people have money to spend and whether our liberalized economy is functioning. In fact, I'd suggest that our economy is increasingly suffering from the population's inability to participate and drive the maximal capital flows and prosperity that are possible. There is an additional distributive and concentration problem which we have been solving even more poorly lately.
Paraphrasing and old soviet joke -- and I also saw the human whose condition it improves
It's more than a matter of losing sight. This is endemic to liberal hyperindividualism which places the individual and "consumer utility" at the center of economic activity. This ideological presupposition actively works against human flourishing - and even the viability of an economy at all - as a precondition for successful economies is so-called "normal social reproduction". Our consumerist economic order is actively hostile to stable family formation and fecundity (as evidenced by precipitous demographic decline) and thus to the health of society in general.
The economy is indeed supposed to be in the service of human flourishing. Modern economics instead optimizes for "utility maximization".