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Comment by asdev | Hacker News Reader

how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?

Thankfully, big tech hiring whims have very little to do with the 'real' economy. Job growth remains strong, GDP is still very much positive, inflation is low..

> how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?

Actual GDP data would be a good first start, no?

lol yea or a few bad jobs reports?

I think many got use to the most incredible labor market of a generation or two and we are just now back to something more historically normal.

I don't understand the confidence behind this. Is a good economy only based on having a job?

Average people are struggling to make ends meet and racking up debt. The gap between pay and the cost of goods has only grown in recent years. How is that good for anyone?

>> lol yea or a few bad jobs reports?

Which ones? The ones they released or the ones they re-released after overstating the numbers several times?

October and November were revised up actually. October’s is still pretty bad though w.r.t. expectations

Not sure why you're being downvoted for saying something correct. Most of the "jobs reports" seem to be revised after the fact. I fully do not trust any government (Dem or Rep) to tell us the actual truth about the economy. Why would they tell us if things are bad? It doesn't benefit them politically.

>how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?

Were we in a recession in the 90s, as the rust belt was hollowed out and earning its name, and Wall street reaped the once in a generation windfall of outsourcing an entire country's manufacturing base overseas? Many would say those were the good times. White collar professionals had their time in the sun for those couple of decades, and GDP exploded. But the working class folks were wiped out.

Now it's our turn at the high end of technology. Once top paid SWEs are being reduced to the understanding that their careers are probably over. The economy today is chugging along just fine, but our little niche of high earning specialty labor is over, just as it was for the auto workers 30 years ago. The capitalists have almost fully completed their capture of the last remaining means of production out of their control; intellectual labor.

This is also my take on this.

Tech became tighter to join 2 years ago and for the next years are going to play music chairs on the open seats as lay offs continue, executives think that AI can replace anyone and younger generation (with lower wages) joins the tech workforce.

It's not recession per se, these companies will continue to be crazy profitable, it's just a change in mindset. See also the famous "founder-mode" that came up recently for startups and scaleups.

I’d wait for the usual indicators to at least start showing this. Up to Q3 2024 (latest data) they don’t:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-in...

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

It says that they’re back filling the roles… you know that doesn’t happen in a recession right?

if you use a more reasonable calculation of inflation and calculate real GDP according to that, you'll see we've been in recession almost half of the years for the last 25 years.

Personally I prefer to use the US case shiller housing index as a good indication of long term inflation. Housing prices are so high, it is the basket of goods that matters the most.

You might be confused by the CPI. The GDP is actually adjusted using a different measure of inflation (the "GDP deflator"), which looks at the actual purchases made in the country over that period. There's not really any "reasonable" alternative calculations to be made there.

Two or more quarters of negative GDP growth

...has never been the rule (at least for the US), just a layman rule-of-thumb that kind of sort of works a lot of the time. It's actually determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). They started relying on NBER back in the 80s, IIRC.

I remember when we were in a recession post 9/11 prices were dropping left and right, but right now prices continue to increase and people seem to be paying them. Can we really say that's a notable decline in economic activity?

My experience is that prices are increasing in required goods (food, housing, healthcare, education) so some people can't decrease spending. I know a lot of people who have cut spending for non-essential things but it's just that the cost of essential things have increased to keep their spending constant

This is the reason for the disparity. Low income people will swear on their life that we are in a recession, because they literally can't buy as much food as they used to be able to. But Middle-class -> rich people just point to the stock market and tell them they are wrong.

This is a great time to be wealthy. All that juicy human labor is ripe for the taking.

The word 'recession' means something though, and it's neutral on whether or not any particular humans have more income or cheaper goods. If you get a raise at work, it doesn't mean we're not in an economic recession as a country, and if you get fired or the price of gas goes up, it doesn't mean we are.

Yeah I understand recession is a technical term. I'm just trying to explain why we keep hearing people say we are in a recession. Most people don't care what the term technically means. They just know their buying power is decreasing while wealthy people are doubling their net worth.

People just want to be able to afford to live and affluent people keep pointing to the chart and saying it's not a problem, but it is a problem. We probably need a new name for it.

Someone I was talking to made up the term "targeted recession" to describe it as some communities are definitely experiencing negative growth while overall metrics seem positive.

more like unchecked greed to me

Facebook is trying to cozy up to Donald Trump, someone that a large portion of their employees hate. Could just as easily be to keep them in line

After the made up AI revolution we now have the made up recession, I can't keep track anymore. Actually did the AI revolution end yet? I still see the grifters out there.

What are you talking about? The Oligarchs are doing great!

The government will never again acknowledge a recession because of the political implications. This is the world we live in now.

Recession has a clear cut, metric-based formal definition. Governments acknowledge them when they happen because it's a black and white situation.

GPD growth is good, personal consumption is up, and businesses are continuing their extremely large investments in durable goods. The economy is, by the numbers, doing extremely well. Inflation is down to normal.

Even economic sentiment is okay. People rate their personal financial situation as roughly as good as it was pre-pandemic as well.

Your points are orthogonal to my original point. We live in a world where the governments will never acknowledge bad news because of how our media environment operates. The NBRE even basically changed their own definition of a recession two years ago when we clearly had two negative consecutive quarters of economic growth yet somehow we miraculously we not in a recession.

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