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Comment by pvnick | Hacker News Reader

"The recession is over" has always struck me a political double-speak. We never left the recession; mainstream America just collectively forgot how it felt to have enough money. We have become accustomed to the 60 hour work weeks for folks fortunate enough to have jobs, chronic unemployment for those unfortunate enough to work outside of tech, the cheaper processed food, the increasing debt, and the lower standard of living. Being poor is the new norm, and "the recession is over" translates to "get used to it buddy, it's not getting any better."

Given that's the case, I wonder what the phrase "double dip recession" we hear thrown around referring to impending repeat economic troubles actually translates into?

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"Recession" means that GDP is shrinking, not growing. That's the definition of that word:

noun: recession; plural noun: recessions

1. 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.

So technically, the recession is over. There's not much room for interpretation there unless you choose a different definition of "recession".

All of the bad stuff you listed are symptoms of an empire in decline as well as a massive change in how the economy works. Industrialization changed the world and so will computers and information related technology. We're right in the thick of things. We don't know how things will turn out in the long term - that's for historians 200 years from now to figure out.

It looks like this period of drastic change will be a mixed bag. People being put out of work by automation puts pressure on the labor market. Educational systems set up in a bygone era are failing to adapt. People are having fewer children and living longer which puts stress on everything from social security to labor markets.

It will probably just take a while for society to sort all of this out. And it may or may not suck in the meantime. I think most people reading this will be just fine and probably live really nice lives. Also it'd be nice if the USA and China could avoid a war/proxy wars while trying to figure out the new world order.

Even though pvnick was incorrect about their claim that the recession isn't over, we should try to look past that.

Their more important claim was that people have forgotten what it's like to have enough money. It's hard to dispute that. In the tech sector, most of us have "enough" money, but it's not the case anymore for the vast majority of people in the US.

> Even though pvnick was incorrect about their claim that the recession isn't over

I was not, please see my reply adjacent to your's

Based on the definition of the very word, yes you were incorrect. If you want to make an argument that we should ignore the definition, provide a reason, but as far as the definition of the word goes, you were incorrect.

Not sure if this was meant as a contradiction or not.

First you said: "All of the bad stuff you listed are symptoms of an empire in decline as well as a massive change in how the economy works"

Then at the end you said: "Also it'd be nice if the USA and China could avoid a war/proxy wars while trying to figure out the new world order."

I do agree we are seeing the US in a state of decline. Too many wars, a destroyed economy just starting to recover, educational issues, floods of illegal immigrants. There's only so much one country can take. Add in the massive amounts of financial aid we give other countries and fight their wars for them, it is very reminiscent of the fall of the Roman empire.

The Roman Empire was stretched too thin and soon became overrun by other neighboring tribes. It eventually took a toll after years of invasions and recoveries. Then education began to suffer, crime increased, production decreased, and cities began to shrink.

Also keep in mind the dark ages followed the fall of the Roman empire. As such, I hardly think we've seen the end of this very turbulent time period.

Your narrow technical definition of the word "recession" is by no means universally accepted [1] [2]. In addition, as another post adjacent to your's points out, there is a common meaning used by everybody outside of economic-savvy circles that refers to periods of general economic difficulty. It is this definition which is more important because this is what the technical definitions of recession attempt to formalize with math and economic indicators, and the tendency to play semantics and say "since GDP hasn't fallen for two successive quarters the recession is over" when the economy is clearly still in shambles ignores the real struggle of millions of Americans who are not seeing the benefits of our "recovery," other than hearing about it on the news.

[1] http://www.nber.org/cycles/recessions_faq.html

[2] http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/11/23/what-is-the-difference-b...

>And the tendency to play semantics and say "since GDP hasn't fallen for two successive quarters the recession is over" when the economy is clearly still in shambles ignores the real struggle of millions of Americans who are not seeing the benefits of our "recovery," other than hearing about it on the news.

The formal definition of recession as two quarters of falling GDP isn't prone to semantic arguments, while your soft definition, talking about "real struggle" and "what Americans see" is.

That's why we choose the former.

>There's not much room for interpretation there unless you choose a different definition of "recession".

Inexplicably, the mainstream definition of GDP omits to explain how GDP growth is distributed.

Equally inexplicably, almost all of mainstream economic policy and theory makes similar - let's be kind - interpretations about economic experience which privilege a certain perspective while ignoring other equally valid perspectives.

So technically you're correct.

Politically, in terms of the everyday experience of most of the population, 'The recession is over' is raving nonsense.

>It will probably just take a while for society to sort all of this out.

I'm betting on a millennium or two. (At least I would if it were practical.)

>I think most people reading this will be just fine and probably live really nice lives.

So that's just fine, I guess?

Given that there's an objective definition of "recession" it's not correct to call it double-speak. You can say that people talk about the wrong thing, or that growth isn't what's important, or whatever, but that's a different argument.

> I wonder what the phrase "double dip recession"

Not as rigorous, but not made up whole cloth: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/doublediprecession.asp

You've unfortunately sparked a fairly pointless litany of quibbling about language, which I don't think was your intent.

The problem is that GDP is a lousy measure of median economic well-being, which is what matters most in social policy, yet it is the overwhelmingly popular summary statistics for (mean) "economic well-being". The problems with using arithmetic means rather than medians are so large and well-known that it's astonishing anyone still uses them, but the historical inertia of such measures is huge. There are decades of social science and economic research that needs to be re-considered in the light of median measures.

The article in question is part of this process, as it focuses on median measures, and anyone who is paying attention acknowledges that median measures are far more appropriate in many cases than mean measures.

"The GDP is growing" is no more relevant to a person who can't afford to buy winter boots than "Boot production has increased". And if the median person can't afford to buy boots, that indicates a major social problem. We need to move the discussion on from GDP and talk about the median person. It's still an imperfect measure, but a much, much better one.

A "double dip recession" translates in those terms to "things getting much worse for the median person."

> You've unfortunately sparked a fairly pointless litany of quibbling about language

Perhaps unfortunate, but very predictable. We have to agree on the definitions of the words we're using otherwise we're just monkeys at keyboards. And starting from a false premise is one of the worst ways to construct an argument.

As an aside, I'm always intrigued when people use words whose meanings they don't really comprehend. I think it's interesting how we try to infer meaning from contexts and how rarely we actually check that model against reference sources.

>mainstream America just collectively forgot how it felt to have enough money.

Yeah, no more easy line of credits for deadbeats and people with zero collateral who want to flip a home they can't afford and sell at a price that won't work. Banks shouldn't provide insurance for investing.

> We have become accustomed to the 60 hour work weeks for folks fortunate enough to have jobs

This kind of thing happened way before the recession and the mythical 1950s worker who went home right a 5 is just that, a myth.

> chronic unemployment for those unfortunate enough to work outside of tech

Tech sucks. I know blue-collar guys who paint or install drywall making my salary. Except they have no student loans, no office politics, etc to worry about. Granted a lot of them pay union dues, but its okay as Joe Taxpayer has agreed to pay their pensions. Do nothing jobs like HR pay six figures. The average salary for a Chicago school teacher is $85,000. If you think tech has all the money you obviously have no finance, lawyer, or doctor friends.

>Being poor is the new norm

If you're an American, you're far from poor, globally.

It bothers me that there's so much whining from people nowadays. Its like they never became a bazaillionare so they buy into the fallacious "things were better in the past" mumbo-jumbo. Yeah, the past wasn't too bad but try not to be black or asian or latino or a woman back then if you wanted to get ahead.

It also helped that the rest of the world was rebuilding from WWII while we had all our infrastructure, business, etc still intact. Maybe being relatively poorer is a good thing if it takes a world war to make us "rich."

I've been seeing a lot of these types of articles lately, trying to convince how bad off the American worker is and how those fat cats in the 1% are siphoning all of the wealth away. I've also noticed a recent uptick in socialist-populist activity. I'm not sure which is the cart and which is the horse but it seems like articles like this have a specific political agenda in mind.

Do nothing jobs like HR pay six figures

Not to fresh college graduates, they don't. Six figures in HR is seniority pay.

The vast majority of entry-level office jobs available today pay very poorly compared to junior SDE. An entry-level HR coordinator is typically making ~$20/hour.

Six figures is seniority pay in almost any field outside of medicine, particularly if you exclude the Standford PhD folks going straight to Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.

$20/hr is about $40k a year. I don't live in in a city, so my first job as a developer was $42k a year. I think it's safe the say the developers I worked with provided more value than the HRC.

If you did live in a city, and you were seeking your first job as a developer today, you could expect your first job to pay at least double that, with just a bachelor's in CS. I live in Seattle and entry-level SDE jobs here typically pay $80k+. I hear that Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon start in the low six figures.

Meanwhile other entry-level office jobs are still around that ~$20/hr or ~$40k/year (depending on whether they're overtime exempt or not) level.

It's not like developers are unique in having lower wages outside of cities. Entry-level HR people in your location probably made significantly less than you.

"Being poor is the new norm" -- you're talking about America, a country that has extremely high living standards compared to most other large (>25M) countries.

And yet even in that context, regression of the standard of living is still a bad thing.

The "but other people have it worse" argument does not negate the need to address bad things happening at home.

Totally agree. We could drive people into the sea whilst shouting "at least you're not in World War II" using this flawed rational.

What high living standards? I'd say medium living standards. Take Scandinavia if you want to claim high.

GP: compared to most other large (>25M) countries.

Scandinavian countries aren't >25M, neither are they "most [...] countries".

EDIT: I started thinking there's more to this argument. Scandinavian countries are more the size of the average US state, than the size of the US itself. Comparing Sweden to Michigan makes more sense to me than comparing Sweden to the US (also makes sense from a GDP perspective: Sweden had a 2012 GDP of $523 billion, while Michigan had a GDP of $408 billion; they're close in both population and wealth).

The GP's point was that the US is rich for its size, which IMHO is testament to the effectiveness of good federalization (the US being a federation of 50 semi-self-governing states). IMHO size does matter, and it's really hard to govern huge countries.

How do you figure we haven't left the recession? Since June 09 we've been growing and not shrinking, which means the recession was over. It may not be the boom we all want, however the recession is over by any reasonable measure.

The word recession has a technical definition about a shrinking GDP, and a common usage that basically means, lots of people or companies have job/money problems more than normal. You have to figure out which one people are talking about from the context.

Not to debate whether the technical term of recession is applicable or not, it seems to me like the the labor participation rate is a reasonable measure to look at.

http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation-rat...

It takes about 10 minutes on Google to conclude that, regardless of any technical definition of a "recession", the economy is terrible unless you you're in a handful of industries or happen to make your money by owning the means of production (shocking that the group for whom the system is named always seem to do just fine...)

Here's a good example:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

Some groups have actually seen their real wages fall over time, even since '09. If your wages are falling, then your economy is contracting, that's a recession. Over-aggregating and being pedantic about technical definitions adds nothing to the conversation, just like saying "my wages have gone up, therefore things are fine" adds nothing to the conversation (not saying you did the latter).

Edit: I'm not saying accuracy in terminology is never a good thing, if you're writing an academic or professional article then, by all means, be precise. But this isn't that kind of forum, so significant contextual inference is called for.

So as long as one persons wage is falling that's a recession? That makes the word meaningless.

Pretty sure that's not what I said. I said that would be a recession for that person, in other words, from the point of view of that one, individual person. Of course you've over-extended my point. I wasn't talking about individuals, I was talking about fairly large groups of people.

Sure you can say specific industries are in recession but if you don't qualify it that implies the entire economy.

A lot of business owners, large and small, still go out of business or do badly in recessions, who are part of that 'capitalist' group.

>> We never left the recession;

The OP suggested the American economy is still in a recession, which is false. Not according to any obscure "technical definition" of recession, but according to the only widely accepted definition of the word.

> Over-aggregating and being pedantic about technical definitions adds nothing to the conversation

His post opens with a statement that is plainly false. Spreading misinformation (even unintentionally) is not a good way to contribute to a conversation either.

While you might find it pedantic to learn how to use words correctly, others may appreciate the opportunity to learn about subjects outside their area of expertise.

Pvnick ultimately makes a good point, but he quite unnecessarily loses credibility among anybody who knows what a recession is. Imagine someone telling you that "The best tablet is the Android" or "Git is a bad compiler." You're likely to consciously or unconsciously discredit whatever comes out of their mouth next.

> The OP suggested the American economy is still in a recession

I didn't read it that way. Whether we are technically in a recession or not, from the perspective of many, many people, we never left the recession. The rest of the comment makes it clear that this was the correct way to read it. Arguing over the throwaway usage of a rhetorically convenient (albeit not technically accurate) term is a waste of time.

Pvnick lost no credibility in my eyes, despite the fact that I know the definition of a "recession", because I recognized the point being made and was able to see through the terminology.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I'd agree that the economy is not doing great for many people, but I don't agree that we should change the meaning of words like that, otherwise they don't mean anything.

You have to also factor in that the G component of GDP (C+I+X+G) has increased dramatically under president Obama [1]. The government can temporarily pull the economy out of a recession by paying people to dig holes and fill them up again. A bigger question is whether all of the government spending has created sustainable economic growth.

[1] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FGEXPND

Does that include overall government spending, or only Federal spending?

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