Recession in America

Further evidence that we average folks are tyrannized by the chronic silliness of the academic economic establishment - the NBER officially declared we have been in recession for about a year. For starters, smart people know that by the time that the NBER gets around to declaring a recession, we are likely already on our way out of it. Notwithstanding where we are today (probably in a recession that began in August) the major laugh riot point about this NBER declaration is that they gave tremendous weight to the employment numbers to conclude that we have been in recession for a year citing that employment peaked in December of 2007. Well yes, employment peaked long ago at an incredibly high level, perhaps even an unsustainable level. Alot of marginal workers - the kinds of folks who don't always show up to work or are frustratingly hard to train or are rude to customers or steal - found work because companies had enough business not to be too exacting in their hiring practices. With business coming back to sustainable levels or worse, marginal employees won't be needed or wanted by employers. Is the NBER to have us believe that reverting from boom times where even the least capable among us found work back to the mean is a recession? Forget output, forget productivity. What if unemployment was at 0% and then went to 3% in a year. Is that a recession? Maybe if you are the NBER, but I'll take that kind of recession anyday compared to what we got in the 1970s and early 80s. That, my friends, is the world of academic economists, blinded to clear common sense thinking by their theories and models.

Oh, and Greg Mankiw - he of anything going against "expert" (read: academic economists) opinion is either ignorant, mendacious or hubristic - today tells us that said experts really don't know and are still just guessing. I guess that is why we have politics, to settle questions that economists can't.

UPDATE: Russ Roberts agrees, the profession ought to be more modest.

UPPDATE: More here.