People who are unemployed or underemployed or suddenly homeless or hopelessly under water home-wise are furious right now. How very not surprising! The unwanted hear a chorus of voices declaring that the “recession” is over. The country is “in recovery,” they hear, although (what a pity!) the pace of recovery has been a tad slower than optimum.
Slower!!! To be involuntarily unemployed a mere month or two is to suffer an excruciating severance from normal life. A year of such is eternity. Now consider that some hard-working, responsible people have been unemployed for two years now. That’s death with little hope of resurrection. Job re-training ain’t what it used to be. Too many jobs are overseas now. Some recovery.
TheFeel of Recession
Let’s begin with basics. Recession, however it may feel to us working slobs, has, our betters tell us, more to do with econometrics than the quality of human life. In ordinary English, of course, recession means hard times, economically and/or financially. It means pain, pain, pain, the which to be diagnosed and treated by (heaven help us!) that wizard class of economists.
Totally turned on by super nerd math games in recent years, economists haven’t been very sensitive to living standards, although a new field called behavioral economics shows some promise of turning the discipline into a tool for creating habitable human societies. Meanwhile, the norm has been for economists to label anyone refusing to maximize monetary gains whatever the cost to other values “irrational.” This is not a term of endearment or respect.As to the present unpleasantness, economists and their cousins the bankers and financiers have looked into their basket of indices (in which unemployment, it seems, plays a rather insignificant role as a mere “trailing” indicator, like an afterthought) and declared the country out of recession. Actually, according to them, the recession ended over a year ago. Did you notice?
You're OK, I'm Not
I thought not. The end of the recession is a kind of in joke. Wall Street is singing a happy song. Although the stock market is skittish, profits are not so bad and bonuses are fat again. Banks are back to pressing for system-threatening privileges. Productivity is up, a good indicator, supposedly. However, it doesn’t mean that wages or U.S. employment are looking good. American workers are expensive luxuries in a world of cheap labor and machines that don't need doctors or vacations or raises. Some of their jobs are gone forever, and new ones aren’t being created fast enough. As for the President, he’s sorry more jobs haven’t been created. I’m sure we all feel his pain.
Fair and FoulWhen economies are in truly dismal shape and everyone suffers, morale tends to be amazingly good. The we’re-all-in-this-together principle comes to the fore, promoting an inclination to pull together to make things better for everyone.
But when some sectors are doing very very well on the backs of the poorly paid and the dis-employed, the result is alienation, and feelings of unfairness multiply. When, on top of that, re-employment seems to rank last on the to-do list of those in charge of the economy, people taking the brunt of the recession tend to get impatient. And angry.
About that Election
It may well be that the economy is improving as rapidly as possible. It may well be that employment is always the last indicator to climb back to healthy levels when recession strikes. In that case, may I suggest that the psychology of announcing the end of recession while millions of Americans are still hurting will not be the morale booster (or vote getter) it’s probably intended to be. Instead, it tells workers that they don’t count. No jobs. No respect. Suicidal for Democrats on the eve of an election.