Referring to Dr. Antoni’s definition of recessions using quarterly data, here are the GDP data series for the US I am aware of.
Figure 1: Real GDP according to BEA (blue), Ramey series (tan), BEA annual (light blue), Measuring Worth annual (pink), all in logs 1990Q1=0. NBER defined peak to trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: BEA, Valerie Ramey, Measuring Worth, NBER< and author’s calculations.
As can clearly be seen, quarterly GDP data to make the assertion that the two-quarter equals recession rule only goes back 75 year’s prior to Dr. Antoni’s claim.
(To be fair, Dr. Antoni is being nominated to head BLS, not BEA.)
Off topic – A new article, so new it’s dated eleven days from now, explains the much lower average human life span in the Southeastern U.S. compared to the rest of the country:
“Mortality caused by tropical cyclones in the United States”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07945-5
The gist is that tropical cyclones cause many more deaths indirectly over time than are counted in official statistics. Rather than the average 24 deaths counted in official statistics per cyclone, the authors estimate 7,000-11,000 per cyclone, with excess deaths wxtending over a 15-year period.
The persistent, indirect effects the authors identify are things like reduced budgetary capacity, damage to infrastructure and so on. Resources destroyed by and used to recover from cyclones aren’t available for other beneficial purposes.
This is new stuff, and there has not been time for the scientific world to pile on. Taking the results at face value, a couple of issues come to mind –
There has been a big migration into the states with low life expectancies and high incidents of tropical cyclones. If geography is the problem, does that mean our falling national life expectancy results in part from a population shift to the Southeast? Will improved budgetary and economic capacity in the Southeastern states mitigate the effect of cyclones on average life expectancy?
The other issue is that we may have vastly underestimated the cost of climate change. If we are going to have more and more powerful cyclones, and the death toll from cyclones is a couple of orders of magnitude greater than we had thought, we’re really in the soup.