by Hunter Hastings
Mises.org
Economists and Wall Street analysts are using the word recession to describe the looming plunge in output in the US economy. We’ll just make the point early that economists, exhibiting the typical emptiness of their failed science, can’t even agree on the definition of recession.
Undeterred by lacking a definition, the geniuses at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere on Wall Street are unrestrained in predicting the imminent arrival of the condition they can’t describe.
As is always the case, people understand the condition that economists can’t even describe in theory. They understand the lost jobs and wages, the reduction in activity at the businesses where they work. They understand fewer shifts, fewer hours, a smaller paycheck, or layoffs or furloughs, unemployment, and the need to ask the government for handouts to get by and to feed their families, when they’d rather be helping themselves. They understand uncertainty and disruption. They feel the fear of not knowing their own economic future. Recessions, like all economics, are subjectively experienced in the human mind, in individuals, in families, in communities.