Gabriel Bergin writes:
Just thought I’d share an infographic you might enjoy. I [Bergin] quite like what they did with the colored ranges of previous curves in the two middle graphs:
I like it. Would it be possible to put the two long time series on the same scale? As it is, one starts in 1948 and the other starts in 1980. The only thing about the display that I really don’t like are those balls on the top indicating the duration of recessions. It looks weird to me to display a time duration in the form of the area of a ball.
The Minneapolis FRB has a different treatment of some of this same data.
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/studies/recession_perspective/index.cfm
In both cases, the alignment in time since the start of the recession is very helpful in understanding, but beginning and end of recessions is somewhat arbitrary (particularly at the local level).
The graphs are nice looking, and we do care about GDP growth returning to its earlier rate, but we should care more about returning to the previous *level* of GDP (and better yet, GDP per capita, but the time span is short enough that this is less important). Similarly with employment (and in a more complicated way). So not only are things worse than these plots say they are, but they’re also not telling as useful a story as might otherwise be told.