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> Lingering effects of the great recession Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S., and are not suffering from the

> Lingering effects of the great recession Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S., and are not suffering from the problem. Also, the problem started in the last couple of years while the Great Recession began in 2008 (EDIT: and has since ended, with unemployment low for the last two years).

coldtea 9y ago
>Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S., and are not suffering from the problem. Other countries (in the developed world at least) don't do as a shitty job dealing with welfare and healthcare, or have people feel like shit for not being "winners". >and has since ended, with unemployment low for the last two years) Unemployment is the easiest thing for government to sweep under the carpet. Heck, if they could fully get their way, working 12hours/day for $1/month would still qualify as employment. Even so: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/great-recession-still-with-us/547268/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/great-r... Or: Economist Logan said that when he looks back, he sees a permanently changed economy. The downturn "left a lingering impact on jobs and on some sectors that never recovered," he said. For example, just before the recession, about 14 million Americans worked in manufacturing; today, that sector has about 1.5 million fewer jobs. And millions of families saw their home equity wiped away in foreclosures, Logan said. "A lot of people lost their jobs and their net worth. And then they had to take a lower paying job. ... It was a blow that they never recovered from," he said. https://www.npr.org/2017/12/14/570556990/unhappy-10th-anniversary-great-recession-you-still-hurt-us https://www.npr.org/2017/12/14/570556990/unhappy-10th-annive... https://www.salon.com/2017/11/21/the-great-recession-is-the-noose-that-hangs-around-millennials-necks/ https://www.salon.com/2017/11/21/the-great-recession-is-the-...
- losteric 9y ago
  I'm not really familiar with the policies enacted towards recovery... How "hands on" was the government in kicking the economy back into gear? Did we do much beyond lowering interest rates? Many smaller manufacturing businesses both depended on selling to and buying from small impacted businesses... self-contained systems that keep money and management local. Restarting those economic ecosystems requires more than just lowering rates. Anecdotally, banking consolidations have made it much harder for niche local businesses to attract financing - the town where I went to college had its entire industry of small farming equipment manufacturers killed off. The big banks refused to finance a "John deer competitor" that built tractors from local parts manufacturers, even though the local farms despised buying from John Deer - their only presence was low-wage retail/repair jobs, extracting profit from the community.
  - forapurpose 9y ago
    > How "hands on" was the government in kicking the economy back into gear? Did we do much beyond lowering interest rates? If by "we" you mean the U.S. government, it spent about $700 billion to stimulate economic activity and employment.
    - jdavis703 9y ago
      The government would have spent more, but at the time the pro-austerity crowd was trying to reduce government spending. This left the federal reserve (and internationally other central banks) as the primary economic stimulator, which has it's own set of poor effects (a stimulus package can function as a jobs program, whereas low interest rates serve to increase the capital that the wealthy already own).
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S. The US recovery looks decent in top-line aggregate terms, but the distributional aspects are quite bad. (And that was true of the recovery from the previous recession, as well.) For broad social impacts, the distributional aspects are more significant than the top-line aggregates.
- igravious 9y ago
  The big lie is that these recessions hit everyone in society equally. They don't.
majormajor 9y ago
I'd say less the recession and more just a particularly-hard-hitting-in-America trend away from the country's historical industrial base. The 20th century US benefited massively from being on the front lines of modern industrialization and mass production, creating a ton of jobs especially in certain regions. And in areas that haven't been able to replace those jobs as the US economy becomes based in different areas and other countries take over in mass production, that's been a particularly rough blow. The sense of hopelessness in a truly fucked town is particularly brutal. Retraining and education sound nice, but aren't going to be all that appealing in practice for a lot of people, even if the money is there. So now the US suffers the hardest from the loss of this industry, the other side of the coin of getting to benefit the most from the growth of it. Add in a historical lack of awareness around the dangers of new painkiller drugs... and you've got the recipe for a disaster without needing any judgmental conclusions about a society as a whole. Britain, another even-earlier industrial power, has similar things going on in some regions, but I'd argue never saw quite the same peaks as the US. It will be interesting to see what a more controlled country like China does if/when all those jobs that first drew money to the country fully evaporate.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  I'd say it's large reductions in government programs, from health to education to food and welfare programs for the poor. I don't have data, but it's hard to believe that such programs have no effect. Also, the U.S. moved on from being an industrial economy decades ago, long before most people realize. In Detroit, for example, auto industry jobs began declining in the 1950s.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Has there been a net decrease in these programs since 2008? I think the opposite is true.
    - existencebox 9y ago
      I was curious, so I tried to answer this question. Problem being, detangling the cause/effect and interactions of e.g. employment with food stamps isn't immediately obvious to me. To give some of the examples I was looking at: Overall, social security and disability spending per capita, and overall enrollment, is up. (at a very high rate since the 90s, comparatively to prior).[0] However, out of pocket costs and private insurance costs have been increasing at even higher rates [1] To look at food stamps, SNAP participation has been going down rather significantly in recent years.[2] It's an open question as to the relative contributions of increased employment rates vs. changes to eligibility (often via republican states imposing work requirements), let alone normalizing this against the various unemployment/"workforce participation" measures to find the "real rate" of unemployed, un-protected individuals, which has certainly not recovered since the recession [3]; implying that the SNAP cuts may not be from the "good signal" (employment is found) precondition. Something that's not well captured in the above (chosen because they were a few "notable social programs" I could think about off the cuff) and someone more informed than I could likely tell me what the core metric for this would be; but there's an worrying pattern I keep hearing about regarding schools pushing for a four day school week. (here's an analysis showing the motivation of cost cutting, and the unfortunately lacking results [4]) If the implied need to cut costs is _that severe_, for whatever reason (my assumption would be a combination of state funding and taxbase) one can reasonably see this as another eroding facet of state/social support, if not necessarily intentionally. All in all; I get the feeling that while local benefit cuts (and more importantly aspects such as increased out of pocket costs for healthcare) are probably not helping, it's only one aggravating facet along the side of a core deeper systemic trend(s). [0] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/disability_trends/sect01.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/disability_trends... [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-care-index/articles/2015/05/07/us-news-health-care-index-shows-massive-increase-in-consumer-costs https://www.usnews.com/news/health-care-index/articles/2015/... [2] http://www.newsweek.com/people-food-stamps-snap-decline-participation-640500 http://www.newsweek.com/people-food-stamps-snap-decline-part... [3] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 [4] http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/93/69/9369.pdf http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/93/69/9369.pdf

coldtea 9y ago

>Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S., and are not suffering from the problem. Other countries (in the developed world at least) don't do as a shitty job dealing with welfare and healthcare, or have people feel like shit for not being "winners". >and has since ended, with unemployment low for the last two years) Unemployment is the easiest thing for government to sweep under the carpet. Heck, if they could fully get their way, working 12hours/day for $1/month would still qualify as employment. Even so: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/great-recession-still-with-us/547268/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/great-r... Or: Economist Logan said that when he looks back, he sees a permanently changed economy. The downturn "left a lingering impact on jobs and on some sectors that never recovered," he said. For example, just before the recession, about 14 million Americans worked in manufacturing; today, that sector has about 1.5 million fewer jobs. And millions of families saw their home equity wiped away in foreclosures, Logan said. "A lot of people lost their jobs and their net worth. And then they had to take a lower paying job. ... It was a blow that they never recovered from," he said. https://www.npr.org/2017/12/14/570556990/unhappy-10th-anniversary-great-recession-you-still-hurt-us https://www.npr.org/2017/12/14/570556990/unhappy-10th-annive... https://www.salon.com/2017/11/21/the-great-recession-is-the-noose-that-hangs-around-millennials-necks/ https://www.salon.com/2017/11/21/the-great-recession-is-the-...

losteric 9y ago
I'm not really familiar with the policies enacted towards recovery... How "hands on" was the government in kicking the economy back into gear? Did we do much beyond lowering interest rates? Many smaller manufacturing businesses both depended on selling to and buying from small impacted businesses... self-contained systems that keep money and management local. Restarting those economic ecosystems requires more than just lowering rates. Anecdotally, banking consolidations have made it much harder for niche local businesses to attract financing - the town where I went to college had its entire industry of small farming equipment manufacturers killed off. The big banks refused to finance a "John deer competitor" that built tractors from local parts manufacturers, even though the local farms despised buying from John Deer - their only presence was low-wage retail/repair jobs, extracting profit from the community.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > How "hands on" was the government in kicking the economy back into gear? Did we do much beyond lowering interest rates? If by "we" you mean the U.S. government, it spent about $700 billion to stimulate economic activity and employment.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    The government would have spent more, but at the time the pro-austerity crowd was trying to reduce government spending. This left the federal reserve (and internationally other central banks) as the primary economic stimulator, which has it's own set of poor effects (a stimulus package can function as a jobs program, whereas low interest rates serve to increase the capital that the wealthy already own).

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S. The US recovery looks decent in top-line aggregate terms, but the distributional aspects are quite bad. (And that was true of the recovery from the previous recession, as well.) For broad social impacts, the distributional aspects are more significant than the top-line aggregates.

igravious 9y ago
The big lie is that these recessions hit everyone in society equally. They don't.

majormajor 9y ago

I'd say less the recession and more just a particularly-hard-hitting-in-America trend away from the country's historical industrial base. The 20th century US benefited massively from being on the front lines of modern industrialization and mass production, creating a ton of jobs especially in certain regions. And in areas that haven't been able to replace those jobs as the US economy becomes based in different areas and other countries take over in mass production, that's been a particularly rough blow. The sense of hopelessness in a truly fucked town is particularly brutal. Retraining and education sound nice, but aren't going to be all that appealing in practice for a lot of people, even if the money is there. So now the US suffers the hardest from the loss of this industry, the other side of the coin of getting to benefit the most from the growth of it. Add in a historical lack of awareness around the dangers of new painkiller drugs... and you've got the recipe for a disaster without needing any judgmental conclusions about a society as a whole. Britain, another even-earlier industrial power, has similar things going on in some regions, but I'd argue never saw quite the same peaks as the US. It will be interesting to see what a more controlled country like China does if/when all those jobs that first drew money to the country fully evaporate.

forapurpose 9y ago
I'd say it's large reductions in government programs, from health to education to food and welfare programs for the poor. I don't have data, but it's hard to believe that such programs have no effect. Also, the U.S. moved on from being an industrial economy decades ago, long before most people realize. In Detroit, for example, auto industry jobs began declining in the 1950s.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Has there been a net decrease in these programs since 2008? I think the opposite is true.
  - existencebox 9y ago
    I was curious, so I tried to answer this question. Problem being, detangling the cause/effect and interactions of e.g. employment with food stamps isn't immediately obvious to me. To give some of the examples I was looking at: Overall, social security and disability spending per capita, and overall enrollment, is up. (at a very high rate since the 90s, comparatively to prior).[0] However, out of pocket costs and private insurance costs have been increasing at even higher rates [1] To look at food stamps, SNAP participation has been going down rather significantly in recent years.[2] It's an open question as to the relative contributions of increased employment rates vs. changes to eligibility (often via republican states imposing work requirements), let alone normalizing this against the various unemployment/"workforce participation" measures to find the "real rate" of unemployed, un-protected individuals, which has certainly not recovered since the recession [3]; implying that the SNAP cuts may not be from the "good signal" (employment is found) precondition. Something that's not well captured in the above (chosen because they were a few "notable social programs" I could think about off the cuff) and someone more informed than I could likely tell me what the core metric for this would be; but there's an worrying pattern I keep hearing about regarding schools pushing for a four day school week. (here's an analysis showing the motivation of cost cutting, and the unfortunately lacking results [4]) If the implied need to cut costs is _that severe_, for whatever reason (my assumption would be a combination of state funding and taxbase) one can reasonably see this as another eroding facet of state/social support, if not necessarily intentionally. All in all; I get the feeling that while local benefit cuts (and more importantly aspects such as increased out of pocket costs for healthcare) are probably not helping, it's only one aggravating facet along the side of a core deeper systemic trend(s). [0] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/disability_trends/sect01.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/disability_trends... [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-care-index/articles/2015/05/07/us-news-health-care-index-shows-massive-increase-in-consumer-costs https://www.usnews.com/news/health-care-index/articles/2015/... [2] http://www.newsweek.com/people-food-stamps-snap-decline-participation-640500 http://www.newsweek.com/people-food-stamps-snap-decline-part... [3] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 [4] http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/93/69/9369.pdf http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/93/69/9369.pdf