Richard H. Serlin: "For people who care about unemployment, we’re still deep in recession."

In comments on the old Stephen Williamson post I looked at yesterday, economist Richard H. Serlin wrote:

Part of the problem is that we don’t care about just GDP, at all. We also care about unemployment. By the GDP definition we aren’t even in a recession, let alone the Great Recession. For people who care about unemployment, we’re still deep in recession. We need a definition for recession/depression that actually takes into account, you know, UNEMPLOYMENT! To see if the early 80s recession was worse, for most people the crucial comparison is unemployment, and how long, not GDP growth.

In fact with our current definition of recession/depression, unemployment could be 30% and if we have two quarters of GDP growth from the 70% who do have jobs, economists would say the Depressions over!

I don't usually look at it that way, but Serlin makes a great point.