Making it much more complicated is the fact that methodologies vary from year to year, and are often created by averaging data from a number of different sources. I've become fairly convinced that almost all macroeconomic measures are so flawed that using them in almost any dimension (across time, between countries) is useless. It may be that everyone involved in creating the overall measures is acting in good faith, rather than some politically motivated conspiracy, but still in aggregate create data that does not reflect reality in a useful way.

The exceptions tend to be metrics that require skin in the game to shift -- the yield curve inversion or S&P500 index, for example, are fairly real, since shifting them would cost a ton of money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I think you'll find the Labor Force Partcipation Rate gives a more accurate assessment of what you're looking for.

"Make-Believe America: Why the US Unemployment Rate Doesn’t Indicate Economic Recovery"

https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2018/03/08/make-believe...

If there was a systematic fudging of those numbers lots and lots of people would notice.

While information freedom doesn’t mean the official metrics are accurate, lack of freedom is a warning sign and should be treated with extreme skepticism.

Also most of the important numbers that the average person cares about such as inflation or unemployment are collected in a very rigorous way that is hard for a government officials to modify without leaving a damning paper trail. Not to mention the vast majority of private measures match up with these numbers.

These measures are by no means perfect. The unemployment rate has significantly over estimated the health of the economy since the great recession, but this isn't due to a conspiracy. It's caused because it systematically under counts people who have dropped out of the labor force, or are under employed. (This is for the most popular unemployment rate number, there are much better employment numbers to use that don't suffer from this issue.)

This is untrue. There are various measures of unemployment, each of which includes/excludes different factors. Believe it or not, some people actually use this data for work, and sometimes not including, say, people who aren't even looking for work, makes sense depending on what you're analyzing.

>Everybody is happy to agree with me when I say that China fudges their numbers, but when I say other countries are capable of the same thing they tell me I'm crazy

I know folks who work for StatsCan and the BLS. You should provide evidence before accusing hard-working people of corruption. There's nothing intellectual about pointing to random things and saying, "could be a conspiracy!" Yeah, anything could be.

Further, we're now in a society where a third of the population lives in a perma-recession where they have not actually recovered from the previous one -- while another section of society lives in permanently good times -- so it is hard to gauge recession from looking around you.

By the way, a recession is technically 2 quarters of negative growth, so assuming we start from when we actually know we're in recession, it's a minimum of 6 months from now before we are in recession so ".390625 years" would be a definite no.

If what you are saying is that we are in a historically unprecedented time you’ll note their metric predicted recessions that happened across a wide variety of historical regimes.

It might be just a coincidence, but it's easy to get/change jobs at the moment, if you're actually willing to work.

No, it didn't, certainly not at the point the recession is deemed to end.

The end of a recession is when the aggregate recovery begins, not when it is complete. (And yeah, recovery from recession doesn't mean most people are doing better, as it's an aggregate about the economy that isn't concerned with distribution—the long “recovery” between the short recession of 2001, IIRC, and the Great Recession saw every quintile but the top without gains, and the bottom three declining.)

The isn't a Boomer vs Millenial thing (it's more of a bourgeoisie vs. proletariat thing.)

Levels of pay have nothing to do with whether or not we’re in a recession.

That is absurd. In a free market with free movement of goods and people, whatever you are getting paid is what you "deserve" aka what other participants in the market are willing to pay for your services.

It is only explicit government intervention that overrides this process; subsided renewal energy sources, childcare, housing etc.

But with everything else being equal your friends were getting exactly what the market could afford. Just because you have a PHD or Masters does not mean someone else owes you a high paying salary.

Of course, everything went to shit so quickly that it took a hell of a long time to come back.

Actually, it didn't really come back unless you're in the elite.

It is remarkable that the domestic product increases so reliably between quarters at all

It is correlated and conflated with asset prices and needs to hire anyone but it stops there. Nuanced talking points have no room for discussing when a recession ended or not.

What you are referring to is an entirely different discussion, no matter how relatable it is to people.

This is not true. Please be more specific with 'all over the world' statement. Do you speak about 5% or 7% of world economy?

It's at least 6 months in: NBER recession dating even for recessions that include at least two down quarters (which, while a popular conception is not the official definition, though I don't think any two-quarter consecutive downturn has failed to be included within a declared recession) is often before the first down quarter in a consecutive pair. (E.g., the Great Recession is timed from the Q4 2007 peak, even though there was only one quarter of decline immediately following, then a dead-cat bounce quarter, then a four quarter consecutive decline. If you looked for a pair of down quarters, you'd detect the Great Recession a year after it started; 4-5 months moves that up a lot.)

"virtually never" also sounds like weasel words considering the total number of recessions.

They've probably got more tools, as they've said that the foreign experience puts negative interest rates on the table as a realistic tool.

But, even if they can't, Congress could, in principal, step in with serious fiscal stimulus [0], which is less limited than the monetary tools available to the Fed. But they've been unreliable in the last few recessions, leaving the Fed holding the bag.

I mean they don't have much to give do they? Unless we're doing negative interest rates this time.

"Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job"

I see social democracy as a necessary palliative that will prevent people from resorting to self-destructive populism. We've got to find some way to bring people back into the fold. I don't buy the idea that investing in our own people leads to authoritarianism.