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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (103121)	2/4/2009 5:50:09 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 544047

shows that the economy didn't just "roll along in the doldrums for the rest of the decade Not really. Its drawing its trend line to the end of the time period in question. People generally don't say that 1940 or 41 where depression years, and its even widely acknowledged that there was growth picking up in a way that would be sustained back in '39. Look at the data up to 1939. There is almost no increase. That fits well with "rolling along in the doldrums". If your quibbling about the beginning 1939 not being the end of the decade, well even going to the beginning of 1940 doesn't show much growth. And also if you "rolled along in the doldrums" to 1939, then "roll along in the doldrums for the rest of the decade" is a rather reasonable statement. Of course it wasn't a smooth trend there where ups and downs within the period, but their normally are in any lengthy economic downturn. A short recession might be all down until you get a decided pull up, but in many cases you get "double dips" and such. Also the way the chart is set up distorts the amount of growth. 12 years gets only a bit more horizontal space then .5bil get in the vertical, and also the base isn't zero. --- As for how to post the picture here. Well it doesn't work 100% of the time (some sites hosting the picture refuse embedding, and also SI won't display all possible types of images) but what you do is enter "[ chart ]" (not including the quotes and or the spaces to either side of "chart") Then paste the url of the image without "http://" (for this picture it would be "www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/depression_gdp.png" (again as in the whole rest of this post, without the quotes) then you put in "[ /chart ]" (again drop the spaces and quotes) And you get