Charts Redux
Have a couple more charts before bedtime:
Job Losses in Post-WWII Recessions (# of Jobs)
Job Losses in Post-WWII Recessions (% of Jobs)
Both charts courtesy of calculated risk blog.
These charts reveal a few interesting things:
1) The current recession is among the worst post-WWII recessions.
2) It’s taking more and more time to recover from modern recessions.
3) The 2001 recession was slow to correct, probably because the approach was purely though tax cuts and monkeying with the Fed.
I think the case is pretty clear for government action to promote recovery.
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February 13th, 2009 at 8:32 am
The second chart (the percentage one) is the more accurate of the two, taking into account, as it does, the exponential rise in population and job availability (i.e. two-bread-winner-families, etc.).
And yes, modern economic recessions have been slower to correct, but I disagree with the overall conclusion. I think the length of correction has more to do with the sheer size and growing complexity of the increasingly global market. In decades past, America could correct without having to worry quite as much about what other nations did (or thought).
Selfish though it may be, in dealing with economic recovery, I think we need a fairly strenuous “America first” policy, instead of trying to fix everything at once.
February 13th, 2009 at 8:51 am
I believe that the % chart is more accurate as well.
Good point about the global market. Another factor is the decreasing % of industrial / factory jobs in American industry. Swings in factory industries are more sudden and harder to correct than swings in service industries, I think.