On Jul 2, 2011, at 9:29 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
> I was arguing with a friend about this, and wondered what the view was here.
> Apart from the rhetorical arguments etc. what would listers say was the answer
>
> 1. Have living standards fallen since end of 2008?
> 2. By how much?
> 3. How does that compare with recessions of, say 1980, or 1930?
> 4. Is there worse to come?
> 5. Are there regional differences?
For the U.S., it's hard to say how much "living standards" have fallen, because we don't have the Census income figures for 2010 yet. The fall in 2008-2009 was sharp, but not record-breaking. The decline in employment, though, was the worst since the 1930s - 5.4% in the formal recession, and another 0.9% in the eight months after the recession's official end. The closest rival was the 5.0% decline in 1948-49 (the post-WW2 demobilization), but that followed a 17% increase. The expansion before the most recent recession was very weak, with employment up just a bit over 5%. In the 1981-82 recession, employment was down 3.1%. But 1929-32, employment was down 25%.
Worse to come? Who knows? My guess is that we're going to have a shitty economy for years, but not an outright recession.
Doug