Well I do attack democrats an awful lot, but not because they're any kind of model of leftist governance

Those are the metrics any leftist would be interested in with any highly developed state or economy. How distributed is the wealth? Are low-earners able to afford a comparative standard of living? Do they have economic and employment mobility? ect. They look to answer the question, "to what degree is the working class subject to coercive capitalist conditions?"

Other economic metrics are weighted toward assessing the performance of capital, and are far less relevant to the questions leftists care about answering.