Time: What U.S. Economic Recovery?

[twa]

Texas still has a unemployment rate of 8% hardly a shining beacon of light, if I were Gov. Rick Perry I'm not sure if I would running around (like he did on the daily show a month back) saying how you did this, you did that when your own unemployment rate is still high. Yes they may have created many jobs last month, but it was manly due to rising energy prices, which they refuse to even mention.

Putting people from all over the world to work is not to be sneezed at(yes,even damned Yankees;)),though certainly Perry is not the main driver.

energy is just a piece of our pie

http://www.texasindustryprofiles.com/ASP/AllHere.asp

[heyholetsgogrant]

Putting people from all over the world to work is not to be sneezed at(yes,even damned Yankees;)),though certainly Perry is not the main driver.

energy is just a piece of our pie

http://www.texasindustryprofiles.com/ASP/AllHere.asp

I love how they don't talk about k-12 schools =)...Texas better be careful of all that population influx, it may flip that state blue =)

[SnyderShrugged]

+1 The banks are doing some of the same things they did before, possibly creating another recession.

All with the sanction of both parties, and enabled specifically by the current congress and admin.

[Wrong Direction]

Right. Because everybody knows that massive spending cuts while keeping taxes the same, during a Great Depression, would really make things better

I left yesterday and came back to this thread with 5 more pages, but my point still holds. FDR's "recovery" basically equates to the economy jumping off of the 10th floor instead of the 12th floor. Did it get better relative to what he inherited? Yes, slightly, but the reason it's called the Great Depression is because it lasted sooooo long and it was soooo bad, even during FDR's tenure.

FDR became president in 1933. The depression ended in 1941, after 8 years of huge government spending to "fix" the problem. To illustrate, check out this graph:

http://visualizingeconomics.com/2009/07/27/unemployment-great-depression-vs-great-recession/

Though it's not clear from this graph, what it's basically showing is that, during the timeframe I mention above, the best unemployment rate was about 2 (briefly) to 5% worse than our unemployment rate right now, and the vast majority of the time (6 of 8 years) things were much worse than that, including another huge spike in the late 30's.

FDR gave great speeches and obviously did a great job with the war, but he wasn't a perfect president and many of his economic policies are completely discounted today.

Do yourself a favor and actually read some conservative economic writings about the great depression. Then tell me why they're wrong. As I recommended earlier, FDR's Folly is a great book which details many economic issues with the Great Depression.

[Henry]

Though it's not clear from this graph, what it's basically showing is that, during the timeframe I mention above, the best unemployment rate was about 2 (briefly) to 5% worse than our unemployment rate right now, and the vast majority of the time (6 of 8 years) things were much worse than that, including another huge spike in the late 30's.

Of course the starting off point was 16% worse than our unemployment rate is now, and went down steadily for four straight years. FDR critics love to point to the 1938 spike as proof that his policies made things worse rather than better, even though unemployment was still 6 points lower and the GDP was still about 30% higher than when he took office, as if economic recoveries during historically severe global depressions should be straight lines going up forever. It's ridiculous.

Yes, FDR was feeling his way and not everything he did worked. I don't think anyone argues he was perfect. But to suggest that the economy recovered despite him, when other countries were collapsing into tyranny and anarchy because of their inability to cope with the depression, I find quite laughable. The fact that FDR was not 100% perfect does not automatically mean that he was 100% imperfect, which is the argument I've been seeing in this thread quite a bit.

[Larry]

I left yesterday and came back to this thread with 5 more pages, but my point still holds. FDR's "recovery" basically equates to the economy jumping off of the 10th floor instead of the 12th floor.

And I posted facts which absolutely, chearly, said that you're full of it.

Now it's your turn to do something besides make grandiose claims.

FDR became president in 1933. The depression ended in 1941, after 8 years of huge government spending to "fix" the problem. To illustrate, check out this graph:

http://visualizingeconomics.com/2009/07/27/unemployment-great-depression-vs-great-recession/

The depression ended in 1934. Because a depression ends when GNP begins to stop declining, and increases.

Yes, I'm well aware that if you desperately want to make bigus claims about the depression, and if you're willing to cherry pick your standards to fit that agenda, then all you have to do is:

• Hunt around for the economic indicator which always recovers last.
  
• Insist that recovery doesn't begin until that indicator has risen so far tha it has wiped out all losses. That, when a person has fallen off a cliff, his situation hasn't started to get better when he stops falling. No, he hasn't started to recover until he's climbed all the way back to the top of the cliff. All of the time he was climbing back up, he was still falling off the cliff.
  
• Ignore the fact that the metric which you've cherry picked is not only a trailing metric, but is the most trailing metric there is.
  
• And instead, assert that this metric is not only a leading metric, but that it actually reacts to things that haven't happened yet.

Do yourself a favor and actually read some conservative economic writings about the great depression.

Do yourself a favor, and quit trying to push information from people whose agenda is to rewrite history, so they can whitewash the only economic practices which have ever worked in reality.

[twa]

I love how they don't talk about k-12 schools =)...Texas better be careful of all that population influx, it may flip that state blue =)

I'll be glad to talk K-12,and compare both value and effectiveness when dealing with the same demographics....No real complaints from me on my kids public schooling here,or my own.

I got news for ya ,Texas was blue not long ago....We even do Blue differently :pfft:

[techboy]

The depression ended in 1934. Because a depression ends when GNP begins to stop declining, and increases.

No it didn't, and no it doesn't.

Recession is an economic term with a specific definition based on GNP. You can check the NBER for recessions.

Depression, on the other hand, is not an economic term, so there is no set definition. In this case, it has been agreed that the Great Depression ended in 1941. From the Library of Congress:

The end to the Great Depression came about in 1941 with America's entry into World War II.

Ironically, it was Hebert Hoover that popularized the term "depression", and he meant it as a good thing. The context was "People say things are bad, but we're just in a bit of a depression. It'll turn around." (paraphrased, obviously)

[SnyderShrugged]

techboy in with the interesting facts! I never knew where the term depression came from before. Thats fascinating!

[techboy]

techboy in with the interesting facts! I never knew where the term depression came from before. Thats fascinating!

There's a longer article about it here. Interestingly, he wasn't the first president to use the term. It was just his usage that took off. Lucky Hoover.

In The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972, author and historian William Manchester argued that Herbert Hoover deliberately chose to use the word “depression” when discussing the economic situation of the time. Although similar economic downturns in American history had been referred to as panics or crises, Manchester explained that Hoover believed that the word depression sounded less alarming.

Manchester is not alone in his assertion. Many have argued that Hoover was, in the words of one historian, “the person most responsible” for associating the economic collapse of the 1930s with the word “depression.” But he was not the first president to use the word "depression." Preceding presidents had long used the word depression in reference to a slumping economy. Particularly noteworthy are instances in which presidents used the word “depression” during periods of economic turmoil that were later remembered as “panics.”

James Monroe, for example, during the Panic of 1819, referred to the onslaught of bank failures and a depreciating currency as “the depression.” In 1874, during the Panic of 1873, Ulysses S. Grant expressed his concern over “the depression in the industries and prosperity of our people.” Rutherford B. Hayes similarly remarked during his inaugural address in 1877, that “the depression in all our varied commercial and manufacturing interests throughout the country... still continues.” These are but a few examples. Monroe, Grant, Hayes, and many other presidents that came before Hoover, did not refer to the faltering economies they inherited as crises, but rather as depressions.

Not only is "depression" not a Hoover original, neither is “Great Depression.” This label was also used in pre-Hoover American history. James Monroe first used the phrase in 1820 in his Fourth Annual Message. In 1928, the Republican Party Platform boasted, “Under this Administration the country has been lifted from the depths of a great depression to a level of prosperity.” Calvin Coolidge, as well as Hoover himself, referred the post-WWI recession as “the great depression of 1921.”

---------- Post added June-17th-2011 at 02:34 PM ----------

You guys are killing me. It's like you are scrambling around trying to prove anything but our own economic policy got us out of the Great Depression. It wasn't our policy after the depression it was the war.

What's really funny to me is the usual crew that proposes that the war ended the Great Depression also hates Keynesian economics (or think they do), but I can't think of anything more Keynesian than suggesting that massive spending on the war effort got us out of an economic downturn.

[Wrong Direction]

And I posted facts which absolutely, chearly, said that you're full of it.

Now it's your turn to do something besides make grandiose claims.

Which facts?

The depression ended in 1934. Because a depression ends when GNP begins to stop declining, and increases.

I know BLS has definitions for when a recession begins and ends (2 straight quarters GDP decline), but that doesn't track well with the widely agreed to definition of the great depression. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s.

Yes, I'm well aware that if you desperately want to make bigus claims about the depression, and if you're willing to cherry pick your standards to fit that agenda, then all you have to do is:

• Hunt around for the economic indicator which always recovers last.
  
• Insist that recovery doesn't begin until that indicator has risen so far tha it has wiped out all losses. That, when a person has fallen off a cliff, his situation hasn't started to get better when he stops falling. No, he hasn't started to recover until he's climbed all the way back to the top of the cliff. All of the time he was climbing back up, he was still falling off the cliff.
  
• Ignore the fact that the metric which you've cherry picked is not only a trailing metric, but is the most trailing metric there is.
  
• And instead, assert that this metric is not only a leading metric, but that it actually reacts to things that haven't happened yet.

Exactly how many years do you think unemployment lags? For the entire 1930's, unemployment was intolerably high. Blaming that on a lagging indicator is disingenuous.

Do yourself a favor, and quit trying to push information from people whose agenda is to rewrite history, so they can whitewash the only economic practices which have ever worked in reality.

I didn't mean to be snide, but I'm absolutely serious that you should read the book I've mentioned. It provides a lot of details about the depression, from bank policies to labor policies to how it disproportionately hurt blacks to packing the courts, and on and on. It's exhaustive, and you might close that book thinking...gee, there actually is evidence to conservative critiques of FDR's policies in the Great Depression, rather than just revisionist history.

Here's one of my favorite FDR policies. He set a minimum wage for women to (of course) protect women. The result? Businesses started hiring even more men because they couldn't afford women. Law of unintended consequences, anyone? Minimimum wages also hurt blacks big time. Poor blacks in the south weren't able to compete in the one way they could (price). But that's just a couple pages of a couple-hundred page book.

[Hubbs]

What's really funny to me is the usual crew that proposes that the war ended the Great Depression also hates Keynesian economics (or think they do), but I can't think of anything more Keynesian than suggesting that massive spending on the war effort got us out of an economic downturn.

What about those of us who propose neither of those things?

[Wrong Direction]

What's really funny to me is the usual crew that proposes that the war ended the Great Depression also hates Keynesian economics (or think they do), but I can't think of anything more Keynesian than suggesting that massive spending on the war effort got us out of an economic downturn.

There are easily two problems with government spending as a way to stimulate the economy (actually, many more than two, but I'll focus).

1) Long term debt forecasts today reflect huge entitlement spending which isn't scheduled to go away. We're in major debt even without stimulus. Adding massive (e.g., major war-level) stimulus has a different long term effect on our budget than it did in 1941. (By the way, the same can be said for tax cuts...you can't keep cutting forever.)

2) Government spending today is even less productive now than it was in 1941. This is true for two reasons (a) government overhead/regulations/permit requirements/prevailing wages/interest on every dollar spent, etc. are more onerous today than ever and ( our economy is less dependent on infrastructure/forestry and the like. In the 30's, a case could be made that more people could work if they just could have electricity, or roads. That was low hanging fruit. The closest thing we have today is either wi-fi (the benefit of which over current internet access is highly questionable) and electronic health records (which will help some, eventually, but not as a matter of short term stimulus and likely not to a huge degree, as the healthcare marketplace is broken far beyond the productivity of information sharing).

[PeterMP]

Here's one of my favorite FDR policies. He set a minimum wage for women to (of course) protect women. The result? Businesses started hiring even more men because they couldn't afford women. Law of unintended consequences, anyone?

Do you have a link for an FDR backed minimum wage specifically for women? The story, as I understand it, is that there was a pre-FDR minimum wage in DC for women and children that didn't survive a Supreme Court challenge, and FDR was encouraged to support a minimum wage through a meeting with women, but I don't think it was a minimum wage for females.

---------- Post added June-17th-2011 at 04:09 PM ----------

There are easily two problems with government spending as a way to stimulate the economy (actually, many more than two, but I'll focus).

1) Long term debt forecasts today reflect huge entitlement spending which isn't scheduled to go away. We're in major debt even without stimulus. Adding massive (e.g., major war-level) stimulus has a different long term effect on our budget than it did in 1941. (By the way, the same can be said for tax cuts...you can't keep cutting forever.)

I've said more than once that just because Keyesian economics works some times doesn't mean it works under all conditions. I think clearly, it is likely that the US taking on debt in the 1930s, when it has essentially none, for a stimulus, as compared to know, will have different affects on the global credit market.

[wilsonian]

A couple of points I'd like to make:

First of all, the “Long Depression” was not a depression at all, but rather a time of tremendous prosperity. Economic historians have incorrectly assumed that falling prices must result in a depression. Certainly prices did fall, but costs also fell. The result was prosperity. During this “depression,” there was an extraordinarily large expansion of industry, of railroads, of physical output, of net national product, and of real per capita income. Money national product grew at 3 percent per annum. Real national product grew at 6.8 percent per year. Real product per capita grew at 4.5 percent per year.

Secondly, Herbert Hoover was not a laissez-faire president who sat back and did nothing. The idea that he took no action is complete nonsense. In fact, Herbert Hoover was the first New Dealer. FDR simply took Hoover’s policies and implemented them on an even grander scale. Hoover himself even scoffed at the idea that he sat around and did nothing:

We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action.... No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times.... For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered.... They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.

Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for ... "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom.... We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.

Thirdly, FDR and the New Deal did not get us out of the Depression. In 1939, real gross domestic product per adult was still 27 percent below the trend line. Per capita GDP was lower in 1939 than in 1929. Unemployment was at 17.2 percent in 1939, higher than it was in 1931. This was all despite 100 percent increases in monetary expansion. Taxes had tripled. As Robert Higgs has shown, the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by creating an extraordinarily high degree of regime uncertainty, which discouraged private investors from making private investments. FDR's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, had this to say in front of the House Ways and Means Committee in 1939:

We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work…. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt, to boot.

Moreover, it was not World War II that brought us out of the Depression. Sure, unemployment evaporated thanks to conscription. Higgs shows us that it was the reduction of New Deal policies, along with a reduction (in absolute dollars) of the federal budget from $98.4 billion in 1945 to $33 billion in 1948, that brought forth the economic recovery. Private-sector production increased by almost one-third in 1946 alone, as private capital investment increased for the first time in 18 years. The Depression did not truly end until 1947, 18 years after it started. Keynesian economists at the time were warning that once the federal government started slashing military spending, the economy would relapse into a depression. The opposite happened: 1946 was a year of tremendous prosperity, in which the private sector experienced the single greatest growth spurt in American history.

It’s worth nothing that every other depression up until that point had ended in a matter of years, as the market was allowed to liquidate malinvestments and bad debt without government intervention. The forgotten depression of 1920 is a prime example. The economy contracted more than it did during any single year of the Great Depression (17 percent). Unemployment jumped from 4 to 12 percent. Instead of "fiscal stimulus," however, President Harding cut the government's budget nearly in half between 1920 and 1922. Tax rates were slashed for all income groups. The national debt was reduced by one-third. Harding essentially did nothing, and the depression was over within a year.

However, when the federal government intervenes, it inevitably makes the situation worse and prolongs what would be over in a few years. The Great Depression lasted 18 years. Japan’s Lost Decade has now turned into a Lost Generation. Like hangovers, depressions must not be resisted, but embraced, for they allow the economy to heal itself and reallocate resources along productive lines. They are a painful, but necessary cure.

Just my take on things.

[Wrong Direction]

What an awesome post, wilsonian.

[twa]

What an awesome post, wilsonian.

I think I like him

[Larry]

No it didn't, and no it doesn't.

Recession is an economic term with a specific definition based on GNP. You can check the NBER for recessions.

Depression, on the other hand, is not an economic term, so there is no set definition. In this case, it has been agreed that the Great Depression ended in 1941. From the Library of Congress:

No, you're wrong.

See how easy that was? All I do is make an announcement.

Maybe I should now follow it up by claiming that actually, there is no definition at all, and claim that therefore, I can pronounce that anybody is wrong, simply by announcing it.

----------

Or maybe we can look at things a different way:

FDR was elected in 1933. At the time he was elected, the economy had been getting worse, and rapidly so, by every measure I'm aware of, for three years in a row.

He enacted many new changes.

And the economy immediately stopped getting worse, and immediately started getting better. Again, by every measure I'm aware of.

And I'm supposed to listen to revisionist spinmeisters say "Well, ignore the fact that he stopped the elevator from falling. Ignore the fact that he started the elevator rising. Ignore the fact that the elevator rose for the next 4 years in a row. Look at the fact that in four years, the elevator had completely regained all of the height that it had lost in three years of free fall. And then assume that the elevator made it back to it's starting point, in 1936, because of a war that started in 1942????

Now, I'm supposed to look at that, and ignore the dramatic change that happened in 33. I'm supposed to say that the recovery didn't happen until 36, because it took 3 years of "something that we desperately don't want to call recovery" to completely wipe out the damage that took three years to accumulate.

I'm supposed to look at that graph, and say that things didn't change in 33, they really changed in 36?

And I'm supposed to say that it changed, in 36, because of a war that happened in 42?

----------

Analogy:

I've seen a lot of people try to claim things with statistics. And I've come to a conclusion over the years:

The more qualifiers you have to put on your statistics, the more likely it is that the person throwing the statistic has an agenda.

When a car commercial says "It gets the best mileage of any sedan", then to me, that's a significant claim.

When a car commercial says "It gets the best mileage in it's class", and then 6 lines of fin print appear at the bottom of the screen, telling me that "class" means "mid-sized sedans with four-speed automatics, front wheel drive, four cylinder engines, not fuel injected, real wheel drive with limited slip differentials, list prices between $33,426 and $36,141, and real seat legroom under 26 inches", then I conclude that somebody spent weeks picking which qualifiers they could use to try to come up with their statement.

That they started with a statement, and then cherry picked the criteria so that the statement came out the way they wanted it.

Well, I believe I've stated the minimum qualifiers one would have to have, in order to make the claim that "the war brought us out of the depression".

You have to assume that GNP going up by 10% a year, for three years in a row, doesn't count.

To pick another analogy: A bus goes off the road. It continues to drive, further and further off the road, for three miles. After three years, a new driver takes over. The bus

immediately

makes a dramatic, right angle turn, and begins heading back towards the road. The bus heads, in a straight line, back towards the road. Three miles later, the bus re-enters the road.

Revisionist: "Well, the bus didn't actually make it back to the road until three miles after he changed course. I'm certain that that right angle turn he made didn't cause us to get back to the road. The bus didn't make it back to the road because it spent three years heading towards it, instead of away from it. It made it back to the road because four years

after

it made it back to the road, the road got wider.

Nope, GNP didn't get back to where it was because of three years of 10% growth. (And the policies that caused those three years of 10% growth.) It got back to where it was because of something that hadn't happened yet, and wouldn't happen for 6 more years.

You want to claim that unemployment is a better measure of recovery? OK, let's take the chart that Wrong Direction posted: (I've trimmed it, and reduced the size.)

Notice the trends in that graph? For three years in a row, unemployment gets grossly worse.

1933. FDR gets elected.

And the graph immediately gets better. It gets better for four years in a row, slips back for one year, and then gets better for the next three years in a row.

No, FDR did not instantly re-hire all of the people who lost their jobs in the previous four years. It took a while.

But he did instantly get the bus headed back towards the road.

And to assert that the graph got better in 33, and 34, and 35, and 36, and 38, and 39, and 40, and 41, because of something that happened in 41?

Nobody could honestly believe that.

If the Redskins appoint John Doe as head coach this year,

And next year, they won 8 games,

And in '12, they won 10 games,

And in '13, they won 11 games, and the NFCE,

And in '14, they won 12 games, and the NFC,

And in '15, they won 13 games, and the Super Bowl,

And in '18, they make Fred Smith Head Coach,

Would y'all actually try to argue that "well, they didn't win the Super Bowl till '15, so obviously Fred Smith (who was hired in '18) brought them back from their slump"?

Edit:

Ah, I've seen we've moved the goal posts again.

No, we shouldn't look at when the economy stopped going down, and started going up. No, we shouldn't look at when the economy successfully gained back what it had lost.

No, what we should to is construct a "trend line". (Which I assume is "where the economy would have been if the Great Depression had never happened in the first place".)

And then, we should insist that we not only have to reach that "trend line", but that we have to do it without counting government spending, investment, or employment.

Heck, at the rate we're going, I bet in a page or two, we'll have people claiming that Reagan ended the Great Depression.

[Tarpon75]

Well, to be fair (meaning using the logic that I heard in 2008-9), the real estate market, stock market, financial market and jobs market were recovering nicely... and then the Republicans retook the House tried to reverse a bunch of stuff and everything went straight back into the Republican economic norm.

I don't believe we were recovering at all or that the implemented polices were working. This current mess began while the Dems were in charge of the Senate and Congress,not to say Repubs didn't have a part. The problem,as others have mentioned is that Wall St. and big business control the politicians on both sides.Unfortunately greed is a controlling factor,and as I have said, both parties are guilty..

[Hubbs]

Don't have the time to put together a more substantial post at this moment (I'm sure I will later, I'm a sucker for wonky economic debates). However, quick question for you, Larry:

Government spending directly adds to the statistical measure of GDP/GNP. The fact that the raw number would go up when the government goes into Spending Overdrive is to be expected. While it would certainly be ridiculous to claim that the statistic doesn't matter at all, or that it shouldn't be part of the discussion, would you immediately label me as "revisionist" if I say that it's worth looking deeper than that one chart? (I know you brought up unemployment as well, and I'm not dismissing that either, I just want to establish how we examine GNP.)

[zoony]

Secondly, Herbert Hoover was not a laissez-faire president who sat back and did nothing. The idea that he took no action is complete nonsense. In fact, Herbert Hoover was the first New Dealer. FDR simply took Hoover’s policies and implemented them on an even grander scale. Hoover himself even scoffed at the idea that he sat around and did nothing:

.

This is the intellectual equivalent of claiming CPR doesn't work by demonstrating it on a corpse. Because that is exactly what Hoover did close to 3 years after the crash.

Comparing that to Bush's TARP is at best dumb, at worst a lie. And I tire of reading it again and again on this board by people attempting to re-write history in an attempt to cling to their failed idealogy.

Moreover, it was not World War II that brought us out of the Depression.

Wait, you just told us there wasn't a Depression.

[Larry]

I assume that government spending is part of GNP.

I assume that individual spending is part of GNP.

I assume that corporate spending is part of GNP.

Does that mean that when we're discussing GNP, that I should pull "Well, I refuse to count this part of GNP"?

Again, my assertion is that the person who has to spend several paragraphs telling you which things to ignore and which things to revise and which tings to change the definition of, is the guy who's cherry picking his data to fit his agenda.

GNP is a nice, traditional, measurement of economic activity. Far as I'm aware, it's the best, most frequently used, measurement. I didn't shop around to try to find the measure that fits my agenda.

(I didn't even shop around for a graph that looked more dramatic than any other. I used Google images, searched for "GNP Great Depression", and I think it was the first one that came up.)

(It did seem to come and go, when I was trying to find it again. So I did download it to my PC, reduce the size to fit what I assumed was a typical PC screen, and put it on my photobucket page.)

---------- Post added June-17th-2011 at 08:27 PM ----------

This is the intellectual equivalent of claiming CPR doesn't work by demonstrating it on a corpse.

Technically pointing out that my CPR instructor, decades ago, began his class by showing us the checklist that we were all going to learn to follow, and that we would be graded on at the end of the class.

He pointed out to the class that meny people have been told that CPR is something that should only be done my medical experts. That the slightest error can result in spectacular harm to the patient, multimillion dollar lawsuits, and the relatives of the deceased spitting on your grave.

The instructor pointed out that the first line in the checklist was "Patient has no pulse, no respiration".

He then explained that the medical term for such people is "dead". And that you cannot hurt them. That as long as you remember the first step (make sure they're dead, before you start), the worst that can happen is that you will fail to bring them back from the dead.

[techboy]

No, you're wrong.

See how easy that was? All I do is make an announcement.

Maybe I should now follow it up by claiming that actually, there is no definition at all, and claim that therefore, I can pronounce that anybody is wrong, simply by announcing it.

Fine. Quote a reliable source with a specific economic definition of depression. What percentage of GDP must be lost? For how long? When are we out of it?

I'm not going to hold my breath, because there isn't one. It's not an economic term, like recession. It just isn't.

You might try reading the link I provided. It traces the origins of the term, and it is exactly as I suggested. I never made any assertion without support.

I'll leave that to you.

And I'm supposed to listen to revisionist spinmeisters say "Well, ignore the fact that he stopped the elevator from falling.

Revisionist spinmeisters like the Library of Congress?

Sorry, Larry. The Great Depression ended in 1941.

[Larry]

Fine. Quote a reliable source with a specific economic definition of depression. What percentage of GDP must be lost? For how long? When are we out of it?

I'm not going to hold my breath, because there isn't one. It's not an economic term, like recession. It just isn't.

You might try reading the link I provided. It traces the origins of the term, and it is exactly as I suggested. I never made any assertion without support.

I'll leave that to you.

Revisionist spinmeisters like the Library of Congress?

Sorry, Larry. The Great Depression ended in 1941.

According to a person who also claims that the term is completely meaningless.

Tell me which standard you are using.

Edit:

I'll also point out: I'm not even debating when it ended. I'm debating what caused it to end.

The economy did not grow by 10% in 1933, because of WW2. It grew by 10% in 33, because of something that happened in 33, or earlier.

(Now, if you want to claim that it grew by 10% in 33, because of something that happened in 32, then well, I could certainly see that. If you want to claim that it grew in 33 because of something that happened in 31, I could believe that.)

(But if you want to claim that it improved in 33, because of something that happened in 42, then you're going to have to explain to me why your time machine didn't make it grow in 31, instead of fixing things in 33. Did the time machine you invented in 42 only have a ten-year range?)

I've posted graphs of GDP. I've posted somebody else's graph of unemployment.

And both of them say that the economy made a sudden, sharp change of direction, from "free fall" to "getting better at a very fast pace", in 1933.

Want to claim that it wasn't over till 36? Or even 41? Frankly, I don;'t care.

Want to claim that it ended because of something that happened in 41? You'll never convince me that even you actually believe that.

That graph of GDP didn't change in 36. It changed in 33. And so did the graph of unemployment.

Did the recovery end in 33? Not even close.

Did it begin in 33? Beyond any question whatsoever.

[techboy]

According to a person who also claims that the term is completely meaningless.

I didn't say the term was meaningless. I said it wasn't an economic term, so citing specific numbers is meaningless.

You don't get to claim the Great Depression ended in 1934 because you see indicators going up. That's not the way it works.

It's an historical term, and historically, the Great Depression spanned the entire 1930's.

I've already cited the Library of Congress on the point, those revisionist radicals.

How about some more?

Scholastic.com, the internet site of the big textbook manufacturer, has the dates as 1930-1939 (for convenience, they seem to have dropped 1929 and 1940. No suprise there).

This site at the University of Illinois says this:

The Great Depression was an economic slump in North America, Europe, and other industrialized areas of the world that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world.

]history.about.com says this:

Historical Importance of the Great Depression: The Great Depression, an immense tragedy that placed millions of Americans out of work, was the beginning of government involvement in the economy and in society as a whole.

Dates: 1929 -- early 1940s

This document at the University of California Berkeley, those conservative revisionists, says this:

Great Depression

worldwide economic downturn that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest

and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world.

Digitial History at University of Houston says

The stock market crash of October 1929 brought the economic prosperity of the 1920s to a symbolic end. For the next ten years, the United States was mired in a deep economic depression. By 1933, unemployment had soared to 25 percent, up from 3.2 percent in 1929. Industrial production declined by 50 percent, international trade plunged 30 percent, and investment fell 98 percent.

The concise encyclopedia of economics says:

A worldwide depression struck countries with market economies at the end of the 1920s. Although the Great Depression was relatively mild in some countries, it was severe in others, particularly in the United States, where, at its nadir in 1933, 25 percent of all workers and 37 percent of all nonfarm workers were completely out of work. Some people starved; many others lost their farms and homes. Homeless vagabonds sneaked aboard the freight trains that crossed the nation. Dispossessed cotton farmers, the “Okies,” stuffed their possessions into dilapidated Model Ts and migrated to California in the false hope that the posters about plentiful jobs were true. Although the U.S. economy began to recover in the second quarter of 1933, the recovery largely stalled for most of 1934 and 1935. A more vigorous recovery commenced in late 1935 and continued into 1937, when a new depression occurred. The American economy had yet to fully recover from the Great Depression when the United States was drawn into World War II in December 1941. Because of this agonizingly slow recovery, the entire decade of the 1930s in the United States is often referred to as the Great Depression.

Now, again. If you have a reliable source that defines the Great Depression the way you're defining it. Cite it.

Otherwise, it's you that's doing the revisionist history.

---------- Post added June-17th-2011 at 09:02 PM ----------

I'll also point out: I'm not even debating when it ended.

Actually, you are, and doing a pretty lousy job of it, too.