[pvnick]

Your narrow technical definition of the word "recession" is by no means universally accepted [1] [2]. In addition, as another post adjacent to your's points out, there is a common meaning used by everybody outside of economic-savvy circles that refers to periods of general economic difficulty. It is this definition which is more important because this is what the technical definitions of recession attempt to formalize with math and economic indicators, and the tendency to play semantics and say "since GDP hasn't fallen for two successive quarters the recession is over" when the economy is clearly still in shambles ignores the real struggle of millions of Americans who are not seeing the benefits of our "recovery," other than hearing about it on the news.

[1] http://www.nber.org/cycles/recessions_faq.html

[2] http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/11/23/what-is-the-difference-b...

[hnnewguy]

>And the tendency to play semantics and say "since GDP hasn't fallen for two successive quarters the recession is over" when the economy is clearly still in shambles ignores the real struggle of millions of Americans who are not seeing the benefits of our "recovery," other than hearing about it on the news.

The formal definition of recession as two quarters of falling GDP isn't prone to semantic arguments, while your soft definition, talking about "real struggle" and "what Americans see" is.

That's why we choose the former.