Home > Recession, unemployment > Length of US recessions 1948 to 2011: chart and graph

Length of US recessions 1948 to 2011: chart and graph

November 14, 2011 Leave a comment Go to comments

from David Ruccio

Increasingly long periods of high unemployment have followed the US recessions of the last two decades. From 1945 to the 1980s, employment rebounded roughly six months after GDP did. But in the wake of the 1990–91 and 2001 recessions, it recovered 15 and 39 months, respectively, after GDP had returned to the prerecession peak. At recent rates of job creation, the lag this time will be upward of 60 months.  http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/newsletters/chartfocus/2011_11.htm

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Categories: Recession, unemployment
  1. Helge Nome
    November 14, 2011 at 6:15 pm | #1
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    The time has come to create a basic income for all. Throwing human beings on the garbage heap is not an option.

  2. Garrett Connelly
    November 14, 2011 at 11:48 pm | #2
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    Looks like the the hockey stick with a rotated axis, leaning against the wall.

  3. Dave Taylor
    November 15, 2011 at 10:27 am | #3
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    Helge, I totally agree, but our culture having become so individualist, don’t you agree that for a good proportion of us, “out of sight is out of mind”, and that many of those who are pulling the political and economic strings act as though human beings were not equal but of value in proportion to their price to society, with 99% of us being of no consequence and the 1% including them being on the way to becoming supermen? I can’t see that emotive arguments are going to alter that.

    Which leaves only the possibility of an intellectual “gestalt”, a Copernican revolution, wherein a mirror image of the dynamic we see now, the facts as they are, can suddenly be recognised as implying something quite different – without our having the impossible task of not only teaching but persuading mankind to act in more civilised ways we haven’t yet been able to agree on. I suggests we need to focus on such ambiguity and come to some agreement as to its practical implications.

    This manifests itself not only in the understanding of the system as a whole, but in many of the details. The key issue is that money is not valuable but a representation of value: a money-box into which we put valuations. Whether value to you is coming or going depends when end of the path you are at. When a banker writes you an IOU in exchange for the deeds of your house, which way is the value flowing? So can those who value themselves and others according their price to society be brought to see that their prices represent costs rather than profit to society, and that their own real value lies in what they have done for others?

    That of course applies not only to the 1% but to recipients of basic income. Here in Britain, Thatcher created a generation of young people for whom there were no jobs, who were given a basic income, and whose expectations now are that they don’t have to earn it. There is also, thankfully, a vague recognition that one doesn’t have to be employed to earn your keep, and many retirees with a basic income now do what they can be shown needs doing voluntarily.

    My saying this won’t of course make it happen. We need discussion of this strategy before we can to agree to pursue it, and more persuasive people than myself to communicate it.

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