My impression is that each recession looks different because a recession is something that happens at the macro scale but is caused by events at the micro scale, and there are lots of different ways to cause a recession such that I expect it to be hard to generalize well across recessions other than “less economic activity in aggregate”. Not that there’s no patterns, but I also expect there to be a lot of anti-patterns or seeming anti-patterns because if you just look at “recession” you’ll get a grab bag of things that aren’t causally similar even if they produced the same outcome.
Interesting. My impression is that recessions can start many different ways but typically kick off the same self-reinforcing cycle, so that unhappy economies end up being very alike as well.
Could you expand on that “end up being very alike” thought.
My initial reaction was very much like Gordon’s and suspect the problem might be looking at aggregate level stats that will tend to hide as much of the details as it will shed any light on things.
One example: (I think, but have not hardcore verified, that) recessions tend to noticeably reduce births. This ends up being really great for the kids who were born into sufficient money, because when they mature there’s less competition for top colleges, jobs, etc.
My impression is that each recession looks different because a recession is something that happens at the macro scale but is caused by events at the micro scale, and there are lots of different ways to cause a recession such that I expect it to be hard to generalize well across recessions other than “less economic activity in aggregate”. Not that there’s no patterns, but I also expect there to be a lot of anti-patterns or seeming anti-patterns because if you just look at “recession” you’ll get a grab bag of things that aren’t causally similar even if they produced the same outcome.
Interesting. My impression is that recessions can start many different ways but typically kick off the same self-reinforcing cycle, so that unhappy economies end up being very alike as well.
Could you expand on that “end up being very alike” thought.
My initial reaction was very much like Gordon’s and suspect the problem might be looking at aggregate level stats that will tend to hide as much of the details as it will shed any light on things.
One example: (I think, but have not hardcore verified, that) recessions tend to noticeably reduce births. This ends up being really great for the kids who were born into sufficient money, because when they mature there’s less competition for top colleges, jobs, etc.