Dollars to doughnuts. For a while I was regularly updating a
chart each month showing how far employment plummeted in the
latest recession and how little ground has been recovered since
the recovery began in June 2009. Compared with other recent
recessions and recoveries, the last few years have looked
especially disastrous: But that may be the wrong comparison to
make. As the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth
Rogoff have written, financial crises are always especially
disastrous. Over the course of a dozen financial crises in
developed and developing countries going back to the Great
Depression, the unemployment rate rose an average of 7
percentage points over 4.8 years, they found. And actually, when
shown alongside the track records of other financial crises, the
American job losses caused by the recent financial crisis don’t
look quite as horrifying: The chart above was put together by
Josh Lehner, an economist for the state of Oregon. The red line
shows the change in employment since Decembe