The Recessionaissance
According to the good people over at Goldman Sachs, “Two recent surveys of newspaper help-wanted advertisements and of employers’ inclinations to add workers were at their lowest levels on record.” It’s time to reconnoiter.
Not too long ago, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke earned the perplexed disapproval of more than a few Americans when he declared the end of the recession: “From a technical perspective,” he told Associated Press, “the recession is very likely over at this point.” The definition of recession—a contracting GDP—no longer fits the state we’re in. But we inhabit a universe of lagging indicators, and human fortunes cannot reverse as nimbly as the lines on a bar graph: a shrinking GDP means nothing to most of us until a paycheck shrinks in response, or until a neighbor loses her job. California’s unemployment rate hit a post-war high of 12.2% weeks before Bernanke’s announcement, while the New York Times reported that job seekers outnumber job openings nationwide by a record ratio of 6 to 1.
As the cumulative expression of human memory, culture may be the most lagging indicator of all. The grandmother who never left the Great Depression is a familiar figure to us all; now she is a Youtube celebrity, making food from the Depression to feed the recession. When economists began to warn of a recession in 2007, FOXNews billed it as a “Media Myth”; now the recession is ‘over,’ the network wonders “Where are the Jobs? 149 Million Americans are unemployed.” The network has all of the top 10 cable news shows and 13 of the top 15: clearly they have their finger on the pulse, and the hearts of most Americans are still in the thick of a recession. Many of us never knew that a recession was ‘a contracting GDP’ in the first place—a recession is a furlough, a foreclosure, a shopping cart filled with knockoffs and staples in bulk. As a sign of the times, a recession is a fashion blog called “The Recessionista” or a depression-era Happy Hour featuring 35 cent drinks; a radio sweepstakes where the prize is not a car but help paying your taxes, a Hollywood barbershop offering $3 haircuts to first-time customers. Culturally, we are in the midst of a recessionaissance.
In New York, the recession has spawned a creative outpouring of poetry and graffiti and even a Brooklyn organization to support art-buying in lean times: Recession Art, whose No Money No Problems show puts our era squarely in the tradition of Depression-era photography and the rise of hip hop in hardscrabble 1970s New York. These times have produced a generation of commentators who chronicle life without work—Unemploymentality, Active Leisure, Faces of the Recession, and on the entrepreneurial end, advice and news mavens who offer their sites as resources for the unemployed—No Job Survivor, the 405 Club. There are websites like Recession Junction—“for all your recession needs”—which prove that the recession-cum-marketing-scheme may far outlive the recession itself. People have invested in the recession—from FOXNews on down to me.
It will be curious to see, when the recession is over by more meaningful measures than Bernanke’s, how long the Recessionaissance will be in receding. Ours is an age of marketing savvy: “Recession Sales” are still a popular way to convince people that the best thing to do with less money is to spend it, and the internet branch of the phenomenon is awash in snappy puns, targeted advertising, and social media. But even as people feel pinched, there is an abstracted, meta quality to the recession zeitgeist; it often seems inspired by the word more than the symptoms. The deep effects of the recession are absent from exhortations to buy a discounted leather jacket or a 35 cent martini, where at Happy Hour’s end the same crowd will pay $10 for the same drink.
But the numbers show that Americans aren’t necessarily buying it: the Census Bureau tells us that retail and food sales were down 8% in August as compared to 2008. In LA, we’ve noticed a bumper crop of yard sales, swap meets and the like this summer, amid growing revelry in recycling and thrift. Could it be that the Recessionance, like the Renaissance before it, is ushering in a cultural shift? The beginning of a new era? Last night, I saw a mammoth golden stretch truck limousine like this one barreling down on me as I crossed the street. “Phew,” I thought—“the recession is over!”
