Here’s a depressing chart, courtesy of the enthralling and overwhelming All Things Data site Calculated Risk.
This shows the percent of job losses relative to the peak employment month for every post-WWII US recession (there have been 11).
You can see that:
- In one recession (1980) jobs recovered fully within a year.
- In six others (1948, 1953, 1957, 1960, 1969, 1974) we were done within two years.
- Two more (1981, 1990) took a little over two years.
- One (2001) took nearly four years.
And of course today we are about to go “off the charts,” nearly four years into it (dated from peak employment, not dated from official National Bureau of Economic Research recession start date) and nowhere near signs of recovering.
People, this is bad.
Do I conclude that recessions are getting longer and more vicious?
No, I shall not make that heroic an assumption; I leave it to the econometricians to figure that one ot. But the data sure suggest such a creative leap, don’t they?
Did I mention that this is Bureau of Labor Statistics “headline” unemployment. Yes, of course it is. Which leaves out:
- Workers so discouraged they’ve dropped out of the work force;
- Those on unpaid leave;
- Those working involuntarily part-time;
- And it does not note the deeply depressing facts that:
- The average work week (33 hours) is the shortest since tracking began–45 years ago;
- The average duration of unemployment (25 weeks) is the longest since tracking began; and
- The “long-term” unemployed (> 6 months) is also the highest since tracking began.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
