First, the U.S. economy is not contracting, but growing, albeit more slowly than it did a couple of years ago. Historians may well look back at the economic run in the 1990s as one of those rare bursts that you get when a new technology is applied into human activity, as happened with the railroads and electricity. If that s the case, then it s unreliable to compare today with, oh, 1996. Today s NBA fan may lament the state of the league and pine for Michael Jordan, but somebody is still going to win a championship this year, even though Jordan has retired and those glory days are gone. The other thing is that economics is called the dismal science and though it is often dismal it sometimes hardly feels like a science.
Economists apply academic rigor to understand and quantify the behavior of human beings.
If economists were any good at that, they all would have invested in Razor scooters early and sold out before the busted elbow class action lawsuits began. Frankly, if great minds could sit around and figure it all out, Soviet Man wouldn t be dead and Russian men wouldn t be prematurely dying. Anyway, it doesn t really have so much to do with facts and figures. Plenty about the economy is just the perception. Pretty much, this is how I look.