You need to look past economic indicators: start examining the distribution of power and control within the political whole in order to appreciate the interplay of economic factors beyond their phenomenality. Analysts of this sort will argue that populists share the defining feature of seeing the world in binary terms: the people against the elite, us against them, the virtuous majority facing the treacherous minority. What the mainstream economist will consider as the ordinary operation of the free market is, in fact, the reinforcement of the two-tier economic order of capitalism (platformarchs and platformzens).