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That's why it is important to have some verifiable agreed upon definitions. "Two quarters of negative growth" is something that anybody can understand and valid
by smsm42 4y ago
That's why it is important to have some verifiable agreed upon definitions. "Two quarters of negative growth" is something that anybody can understand and validate. Too simplistic? OK, make it more complex formula, whatever - but make it a formula, and make it fixed, so people can be sure neither Rs nor Ds can game it (at least not easily).
Instead what we're getting is "holistic criteria" which means pundits can argue on TV for hours (which they probably love to) and everybody gets to keep their partisan views and there's no objective meaning to any terms anymore. No wonder people have low confidence in "experts" and grasp at whatever they find on the internet to find some clarity.
- 8note 4y agoI'm not clear that "in a recession" is a particularly useful state to anyone. Even with a complex formula, you're still dropping the useful details. Even with a predictable complicated formula, you still have the question to debate: "does it matter?"
- smsm42 4y agoPeople like certainty more than uncertainty, even if it's a bad certainty. That's why the have all these classifiers. It's easier to handle two situations "we're in a recession, we're not in a recession" than track about 50 economic parameters that are interwoven in a thousand complex ways. If you are a professional economist, you probably need to do the latter, but if you are a regular person, you probably have neither time nor capability to do it.