Realizing that GDP growth can be achieved while average joe on Main Street is struggling. The billionaires doing well masks everyone else struggling to afford groceries.
In general, people are kind of calling BS on what the definition should be because we are all collectively feeling that things are doing poorly but no one is quite willing to recognize it due to the definitional stuff.
What did your response have to do with your quote?
We can have the most growth ever as a civilization and still have the common person lose out.
The Industrial Revolution also famously had a lot of people pushed into impoverished situations while robber barons or the highland clearing lords won out, despite the GDP of those respective countries increasing.
> What did your response have to do with your quote?
The notion that growth can be unequal is not something that has changed. The anomaly was the post-WWII eventide regime.
That doesn't mean there is anything natural about unequal growth. But if we want to return to that previous mode, we have to first understand what it was. And what it was was anomalous.
> Why do you think I responded to you the way I did?
How is the rhethorical-question style working out?
I'm pointing out an ahistorical claim in the top post. You want to broaden the discussion without acknowledging that, and without actually saying anything, which isn't particularly interesting to engage on.
You didn’t point out an ahistorical claim. They didn’t claim that GDP wasn’t growing. They said that it wasn’t helping the common man and you jumped in with an equivalent of “but the DOW is over 50k”
> They didn’t claim that GDP wasn’t growing. They said that it wasn’t helping the common man and you jumped in with an equivalent of “but the DOW is over 50k”
No, this is a ridiculous misreading. They said that "realizing that GDP growth can be achieved while average joe on Main Street is struggling" is "what changed." That is ahistorical. I may realize, today, that the sky is blue, but that's a personal discovery, not a general one. GDP growth amidst widespread poverty has been the default in most of human history; it isn't what changed.
Whether or not GDP is growing was never brought up by anyone except you.
The connection is that GDP/Recession has never been about mainstreet or average joe.
Recession is usually bad for Joe and mainstreat, but the opposite is not implied. It is ignorant to think it is or was defined by the average experience.
I feel it’s also ignorant to think it shouldn’t be defined by that experience. Our metrics have been misleading or we just need better ones and/or possibly a new word for how average joe talks about “recession”. A purely academic definition that has no basis in reality seems pointless to me.
purely academic definistions have a tremendous number of purposes.
Just as it would be silly to define a countries military equipment production capacity by public sentiment, the same is true for purely financial GDP.
There are tons of metrics that can used to articulate how the economy feels for average joe. We have low consumer sentiment, lagging median income, GINI, opinion surveys, ect.
Using the word "recession" adds gravitas by claiming something that isnt true.
> it’s also ignorant to think it shouldn’t be defined by that experience
If defined rigorously, sure. But the literature is replete with measureas of downturns.
What more commonly comes up in online discussions is some dude with a vibe, which isn't particularly useful for talking about anything larger in scale than that one dude.
Even during the Industrial Revolution as well. And even the idealized vision of the 1950s-60s that is common on the Internet was itself a fantasy for a plurality of Americans until the Great Deal began sinking in.
There was a period of slightly more income equality in the 1930s-1960s as Piketty [0] and Zucman [1] show, but this was also at the expense of racial and gender equality.
The 1970s was probably the most equal period economically speaking as Zucman showed [1].
We should not strive to return to the 1950s - we should strive to be better than anytime previously.
I think that’s what’s changed though, as GP asked, people want to define recession as closer to the social wellbeing than a metric like gdp that is divorced
Doesn’t this kinda create a problem though? Like a recession implies economic slowdown, but social wellbeing can decrease while the economy is fine.
For example, a plague or severe weather might make the average person have a worse standard of living, but if the economy isn’t net affected, it seems wrong to say we are in a recession.
Our vocabulary is too limited then. I know average people only use the word recession when things are compounding negative towards their personal finances / economics AND they feel like most people they know are dealing with the same. They don't claim it's a Katrina/Harvey/[any storm name] recession, they know the differences and that storm driven struggles are usually localized / temporary with a known amount of work to rebuild - average joe feels helpless in a macro-recession as it's only going to be solved in time and/or with help of politicians they don't trust.
Plagues are a weird example, because I can't think of any situation where a plague would not affect the economy - and it should effect it negatively. I think COVID effected it negatively, we just chose to have a financial long COVID and drag out what should have been a financial disaster without all the government programs. Instead of economic collapse and starvation, we chose to massively spend money knowing it would be paid in time through inflation and also knowing it wouldn't get reallocated in an even way as pre-COVID. (That's my take, I don't know if there's any validity to it but it's just my gut feeling.)
Historically, both politicians and yhe media considered two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. The Biden administration changed that, basically arguing that the definition is too narrow and they preferred to use a more broad set of indicators that just so happened to avoid calling a recession when they wanted to claim a strong economy.
The Biden administration argued for a change. They did not convince others. It's like saying "Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico" - no one but loyalists bought in.
Economists continue to use the same definition as before, despite your attempt to blame Biden.
It wasn’t “revoked under Biden.” That implies the Biden administration (or any administration) gets to define this. They don’t. Recessions in the United States are generally demarcated by NBER.¹
>It does imply that because the Trump admin killed the group involved with preventing pandemics[1]
No it doesn't, not without massively reading in between the lines. This is getting to absurd levels of nitpicking over wording, like "autistic people" vs "people with autism".
>I assume you are being disingenuous by using that claim while also trying to smear the Biden admin.
Two can play at this game. I assume you're being disingenuous by trying to put words in my mouth over tiny disagreements in wording.
That was never such a "rule"; that was 1 of 4 considerations from a 1974 NY Times opinion piece, and those 4 considerations were in turn a simplification of the overall recession considerations, as the combined 4 items were intended to be more understandable by the general public than the actual items.
Where had you heard that there was such a "rule"?
(And as others pointed out, it's a private organization, not the government, that has set and evaluates recession criteria.)
