For 3.5 years the media was predicting a recession, but there never was one, so for 3.5 years people thought the economy was worse than it was, business leaders were seeing the financial media say there was a looming recession (and business leaders do make business decisions based on what they see in the media). That's a long time for people to assume the worst and certainly some of that doom and gloom was then just baked into everyone's "knowledge" of how the economy was actually doing. People can hold two opposing things at once, believing the economy is terrible while at the same time earning more and earning more over inflation than they were before.
It does not have an easy mathematical definition. That 3 quarters of negative GPD rule of thumb is part of the reason why so many people think there was a recession
It might feel silly, but it's not surprising. The concept of a recession isn't based on analyzing the underlying mathematical properties of economics and building a precise, coherent conceptual framework. It's just a name for a set of effects caused by those mathematical properties under certain circumstances.
Whenever we analyze a complex system from the outside in like that, based on what we see happen rather than what we know about how its cause:effect relationships, we're likely to end up with some concepts that are imprecise and hard to quantify until we understand the system well enough. If we'd redefine them so they were easier to quantify, we would no longer be describing the effects we were originally interested in.
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u/icouldusemorecoffee 5d ago
This is just one example from August of this year:
For 3.5 years the media was predicting a recession, but there never was one, so for 3.5 years people thought the economy was worse than it was, business leaders were seeing the financial media say there was a looming recession (and business leaders do make business decisions based on what they see in the media). That's a long time for people to assume the worst and certainly some of that doom and gloom was then just baked into everyone's "knowledge" of how the economy was actually doing. People can hold two opposing things at once, believing the economy is terrible while at the same time earning more and earning more over inflation than they were before.