Economic Recovery
From an excellent article by David Leonhardt in the NY Times, emphasis mine (hat tip: The Daily Dish):
Either way, the job market will still be in terrible shape. The unemployment rate, at 9.8 percent in September, could conceivably hit 10 percent for the first time since 1983. When that happens, some economists are bound to argue that the normal mechanisms of economic recovery have broken down.
So it’s a good time to remember that when an economy is just coming out of recession, its weaknesses are always more obvious than its potential strengths.
“Of course, there is a long list of things to worry about,” says Robert Barbera, an economist and the author of a recent book on the financial crisis. “But it’s ever thus. If that were the reason you didn’t have a genuine recovery, you would never have a genuine recovery.”
People tend to become overly pessimistic at the end of a recession, partly because they can see that the forces behind the last boom — housing and mortgage lending, in this case — won’t be around for the next one. If anything, the excesses from the last boom seem likely to hold back the economy for years to come. People are left to wonder where future growth will come from.
So essentially, the things that are going to power the next economic boom in our country we are blind to right now. But they’ve already started and are all around us. And in a year or so, we’ll be talking about them like they’re normal, everyday things. Kinda like Twitter, right? Except they haven’t made a dime yet…