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I'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

• smsm42 4y ago
  People 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.