Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

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Has that been the definition, or has that just been your understanding, which may have been wrong? Has there really been a redefinition?

I mean, if we just take Wikipedia as a gauge, they have defined it according to the NBER, dating back to 2008 [1].

  A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.

There does appear to be a recent, ad-hoc redefinition edit battle going on [2][3], but it's to redefine it as you are saying here rather than accepting what has been there for over a decade... apparently for the purpose of using it as a political cudgel [4]. Maybe not so Orwellian, just a misconception.

[1] https://www.nber.org/news/business-cycle-dating-committee-an...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Recession&diff=pr...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Recession

[4] https://twitter.com/RepublicanStudy/status/15516279756401909...

Also from Wikipedia: While national definitions vary, two consecutive quarters of decline in a country's real gross domestic product is commonly used as a practical definition of a recession.

From the Oxford dictionary (recession): a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.

It's only now that we're seeing all this slimy lawyering about the definition of recession. "Well acksually, technically..."

We can accept that lots of people believe 2 consecutive quarters of GDB decline define a recession, while also admitting that the group that officially defines a recession in the US hasn't done any sort of Orwellian redefinition at all.

It appears, once again, the people trying to refine the word are accusing the people keeping the historical usage as the changers. It's projection all the way down.

The NBER has called a recession every single time we had two back-to-back quarters of negative growth. The news media is known to aggressively jump to conclusions to produce headlines. It's a notable exception that they are so cautious all of a sudden about what is really a foregone conclusion.

In those instances, were there also declines in real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales? In the current climate, are those things declining? Maybe the answer to those questions help explain the discrepancy.

Real earnings has been in a sharp decline since 2020, now mostly thanks to inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I don't have the time to link the other stats, but they're not so rosy either, except employment. One good stat and several bad ones is still a recession.

I think that chart shows that things are going back to normal. The reason weekly earnings were at an all time high in q2 of 2020 is because the low wage earners all got laid off because of the pandemic. Now that things are going back to normal, the low wage earners are going back to work at approximately the same real wage (although nominally it's probably a bit higher because of inflation).

That's quite an interesting bias and probably accurate, but one issue you run into here is that wages now are lower than even Q3 2019 which is well before any of this kicked off. And the current trajectory is downward.

So it seems safe to say that real earnings are indeed decreasing, rather than regressing to some past mean.

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