"Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife (Allie Mae Burroughs)," 1936 Photograph by Walker Evans via the Metropolitan Museum of Art
UPDATE – 7/21/11: In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman provides a convenient definition of “Great Recession” (which he limits to a two-year period) and coins a new term, the “Lesser Depression.” If “Great Recession” smacks of hyperbole, this one really takes the cake.
“In fact, policy makers seem determined to perpetuate what I’ve taken to calling the Lesser Depression, the prolonged era of high unemployment that began with the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and continues to this day, more than two years after the recession supposedly ended.”
When did the recession become the Great Recession? At some point, the current downturn in the economy morphed from a mere bad patch into a capital-letter event, a prolonged slump whose title carries more than the country are suffering from drought, but there is no Dust Bowl. The social safety net, itself partly a product of the Depression, has reduced the number of hungry and destitute people. Walker Evans’ sobering black and white portraits of poverty have given way to “ruin porn,” a genre of photography in which the camera feasts its eyes on overgrown lots and condemned Detroit properties. What’s notable is that these pictures are of things, not people; the recession has pushed families out of their foreclosed homes, but it has not led — in most cases, anyway — to starving children. New York Times columnist David Leonhardt agrees that there is no real comparison between today’s recession and the depression of the 1930s: “It is no coincidence that this downturn has been far less severe than the Great Depression,” he wrote in a June 14 column. Yet just over a month later, Leonhardt is using the new label, observing recently that “There is no shortage of explanations for the economy’s maddening inability to leave behind the Great Recession and start adding large numbers of jobs.” When even The New York Times signs on to a neologism, you can be sure of its place in the vernacular. Indeed, the term appears in straight news articles as well as in more casually-written opinion pieces. The same day that Leonhardt made the reference in his column, an article in the National section discussed the impact of federal budget cuts, which “many governors fear will hurt their states as they are still recovering slowly from the Great Recession.”
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when and where the “Great Recession” phrase was coined. Google’s Books Ngram Viewer, which mines a database of more than 5.2 million books to chart the frequency of usage of a word (or words) over 200 years, isn’t much help: Its most current year is 2000, which means that the graph spikes dramatically during the stagflation crisis of the 1980s and then trends downward as time goes on. After all, in 2000, the U.S. was running budget surpluses, the dot-com bubble was still expanding, and banks hadn’t begun throwing mortgages at anyone with a pulse. I would imagine, however, that “Great Recession” is a fairly recent term. It seems to be popping up everywhere lately, and beyond anecdotal evidence, it seems logical to assume that economy has to be lousy for quite awhile before people start prefacing anything with the word “Great.” The financial crisis hit in 2008; three years of high unemployment rates and stagnating wages are apparently enough for writers and politicians to begin drawing parallels to the largest economic downturn in modern history.
Is it "ruin porn"? "Algernon, Detroit" Photograph by Andrew Moore via andrewmoore.com
The term isn’t universal by any means. Its slightly kitschy air makes it more suited to Associated Press stories, which already take a conversational tone (“So what can you do to reduce your risk of heart disease?”) and employ colloquial language (children are always “kids,” and two words are verboten when a contraction is possible). Indeed, the AP has been a great populizer of the phrase; hardly a day goes by that a story referencing the Great Recession can’t be found on its home page. AP writers regularly use the term multiple times in one story. On July 9, under the headline “Black economic gains reversed in Great Recession,” the reporter notes that “economists say the Great Recession lasted from 2007 to 2009,” and that a woman interviewed for the article “pulled herself out of poverty and earned a middle-class life – until the Great Recession.” That the recession technically ended in 2009 but is only now coming into use as a title fits with the idea that we are always looking backward. The economy is officially growing, albeit slowly, but the economic slump only became Great when its effects seemed to last much longer than two years. In another AP story, the reporter notes that, while “the country may be pulling out of the Great Recession,” states still face tight budgets.
“Great Recession” turns up in a variety of magazines, and is used not just by members of the chattering class but by politicians-cum-authors like Al Gore, who excoriates the media’s coverage of global warming in Rolling Stone. He writes that “anyone who honestly examines the incredible challenges confronting President Obama when he took office has to feel enormous empathy for him: the Great Recession with the high unemployment and the enormous public and private indebtedness it produced; two seemingly interminable wars . . . .” The term isn’t evident (at least by my count) in The Atlantic Monthly until the July/August issue, when two of the authors of its “14 Biggest Ideas of the Year” make the reference in their one-page blurbs. It’s used first in a piece about government bonds — “For more than a decade before the Great Recession began, a surge of global saving increased the demand for Treasury bonds and raised their prices, delivering handsome capital gains” — and again in a discussion of multi-generational households, which notes that, “during the Great Recession, 2.6 million more Americans found themselves living with relatives.”
Just as notable, however, are the publications that decline to use the phrase, which has a hyperbolic, populist edge that one can imagine the Times copy editor shaking his head at. For every mention in the Times, there are, at the least, four of five sentences in which the economic downturn is referred to simply as “the recession” — lowercase, no qualifier. A June 20 article on an uptick in charitable donations observes that “the increase was the first since 2007, when the recession started and led to the biggest decline in giving in more than 40 years.” Likewise, a July 3 piece on executive pay talks about “the 2008-9 recession.” In many cases, well-written papers like the Times seem to be reaching for a more specific designation than the nebulous “Great Recession,” which raises as many questions as it answers. How long does a recession have to be to be considered Great? Does the term refer only to the official recession, defined by economists as two successive quarters of decline in GDP, or does it encompass the three or four years of general malaise in which the country still feels trapped? The Japanese speak of a “Lost Decade,” which is actually more precise than “Great Recession,” as it at least denotes a specific time period. Also up for grabs is whether “Great Recession” refers to the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis, or whether it includes the post-bailout years as well.
As long as unemployment tops nine percent and home prices continue to flatline, usage of “Great Recession” will only grow in frequency. People like to think that they are facing the worst hard times, that no one has had it as bad as they, and the connection to the Great Depression fills that desire. Newspapers and other media outlets strive to speak to the greater, less-educated segment of the population that turns to the Internet for news and regards the “media elite” with suspicion. “Great Recession” is not a particularly precise or even accurate term, but unfortunately, it seems it is here to stay.
. . . So Well Read. . . 