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The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was not promoted 16:52, 20 March 2008.

List of recessions in the United States

[edit]

I think this list is WP:FL worthy. Feel free to comment, and edit the article if you think that it needs some tweaking. Gary King (talk) 01:24, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The Comments column is currently being redone. Please write about those in an hour from now. Gary King (talk) 02:24, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved stuff from Drewcifer

Comment The list seems very US-centric. Surely there have been many other recessions in many other countries? The scope of the list isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't match the list's name. Perhaps it should be renamed to "List of American recessions" or "List of recessions in the United States" or something like that? Drewcifer (talk) 02:35, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done Gary King (talk) 04:47, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Cool. My only other complaints concern some of the language explaining some of the recessions. In general the explanations are well-written, but I think the language could be tightened up some. For example, many of them begin with "This was" or "This began."
  • Also, some of the explanations could be considered POV: "the public, which viewed the embargo as a violation of their rights." (can you really speak for the entire American public?), "poor government policies" (who says they were poor?).
  • Also, I think you could replace the word percent with the % symbol a couple of times.
Drewcifer (talk) 04:57, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved stuff from PeterSymonds

Comments

That's about it for now. I'm being kept awake by heavy wind so I thought I'd give a review to keep me occupied :) Some of my comments may/may not be helpful. Again, a great list, congrats! PeterSymonds | talk 02:37, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

PeterSymonds | talk 03:33, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support The nominator has addressed all of my concerns. PeterSymonds | talk 04:44, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved comments from Matthew

Comments

  • The list is pushed half way down the page by the graphs. I haven't looked at the source code to really figure it out, but maybe {{clear}} or div style is in use?
  • I'd expect the duration column to be a total of the years, not the years themselves. Could you include another column so both are shown?
  • Isn't the country currently in recession?
-- Matthew

A lot of changes made for the better since first nominated. I was holding out to see if Orlady's two rather major points were addressed, and since they are: Support -- Matthew | talk | Contribs 06:15, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved stuff from The Rambling Man (talk) 11:22, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

  • "This list is sorted chronologically by the year when each recession first began, and from the earliest recession to the latest." - not keen because the list is sortable so resorting it would end with this statement being incorrect.
  • You have one dead link according to this.
  • Remove space before [6] in the caption per WP:CITE.
  • Remove spaces in the year ranges so 1797–1800, instead of 1797 – 1800.
  • "The deflation of the Bank of England crossed the Atlantic " - hmmm, not sure the deflation crossed the Atlantic, perhaps the effect of it did...
  • "economy was hurt " - reword to be more specific, in what way?
  • 1920-1940 in the caption needs an en-dash.
  • "Top Oil Producing Counties," - why capitalised and should it be countries?
  • "The bubble burst " - not particularly encyclopaedic.
  • "A run on..." - explain or link for economics non-experts.
  • "There was a post-Korean War inflationary period that took place, " - inelegant to say the least!
  • "Dot Com Bubble" or "dot-com bubble", you choose.
  • Do you need recession as a see also since you've already linked to it in the lead?

A few minor points, but nice work nonetheless.

Done all the above. Gary King (talk) 10:39, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The Rambling Man (talk) 10:18, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Further comments

  • The sort on duration doesn't work correctly.
  • Could be a pain but the GDP graph probably needs an en-dash in the caption "GDP 1920-40"
  • Ref [7] has a peculiar JosÃ@ thing going on.

But much improved. The Rambling Man (talk) 11:22, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support - all my concerns addressed. The Rambling Man (talk) 08:53, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Oppose. This is an impressive piece of work, and I want to see more FLs about serious topics such as this one, but I must oppose it because of content issues. I looked at the listings, articles, and references for some of the late-20th-century recessions for details on how "recession" was defined and how the beginning and ending dates were determined. I was disappointed not to find what I was looking for. Two specific examples:
    • I don't believe that Great Commodities Depression deserves to be labeled a recession (or a depression) at all. It appears to be a 20-year period of depressed commodity prices, not a period of decline in GDP or of negative real economic growth. Note that most of this 20-year period coincided with a 10-year economic expansion that occurred from March 1991 to March 2001.[1]
    • I was puzzled by the indication that the Late 1980s recession lasted until 1995. (See above reference regarding the economic expansion that began in 1991.) The reference cited in that row of the table didn't explain where those dates came from. The reference is about the stock market crash in October 1987; it doesn't say anything about the state of the economy over the next 8 years, and it most definitely does not say that the economy was in recession for those 8 years. The article Late 1980s recession did not resolve things. Its second paragraph says: "According to the widely-used definition of a recession, two quarters of negative growth, the late eighties recession only covered a brief period in 1987 (although not in the United States, where recession did not hit until 1990), and another in 1990–1991. By measures such as unemployment and public perception, the North American economy was in recession continuously for years after 1987, with only brief periods of revival.[citation needed]" That paragraph hints of original research (it's completely unsourced), and it explicitly states that the United States did not go into recession in 1987.
    • Done Removed. I've also tagged the original article. This was originally in the list because the list previously focused on global recessions, but after making the move to focus only on United States-related recessions, this particular one was left behind. Gary King (talk) 02:57, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    This led me to conclude that the article is not nearly ready for featured-list status. I'm no economic historian, but what I see in this article does not appear to be solid economic history.
     Done Additionally, I don't like the way the graphs force the table to be so narrow. Only the Great Depression graph truly illustrates a recession. I would recommend moving that graphic up into the introduction (set the thumbnail width to 300px for readability) and deleting the other images.
    Done Gary King (talk) 10:44, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    --Orlady (talk) 22:45, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm very pleased to see the improvements to content since I posted the above comments, but I still have some questions about content. Working backwards in time:
    • NBER shows a period of contraction from 1990-1991 -- was this not considered a recession? (It's not in the table.)
    • The dates given in the table for Early 1980s recession don't match what I find on NBER or in the article. (That one should be an easy fix.)
    • The 1979 energy crisis does not seem to precisely correspond to a "recession" as defined by NBER. Although it was clearly the causative event that led to some economic contractions, NBER did not identify a "peak" until early in 1980, with recovery beginning later in 1980. The article on the energy crisis talks mostly about the price of oil and does not say much about its effect on the overall economic cycle. I wonder if both the article and the list need to be revised; the article to say more about the effects on economic activity around the world and the list to say more about the subtleties of dates for the recession that ensued from the 1979 crisis.
    No time right now to finish this process, but I think you can see where I'm going with my comments. This is a nice list, but I want to make sure it's a great list before it gets that "featured" star. --Orlady (talk) 21:40, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Done all of the above except for the last one. Could you link me to the article about that and I can take a look? Gary King (talk) 01:55, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Nice work. Regarding the 1979 oil crisis, I think you are asking about sources on the recession that ensued. As I said, I'm no economic historian, so I don't know the best sources, but I've looked at various NBER releases that give insight on what happened to the U.S. economy in 1979 and 1980. In July 1979 the Business Cycle Dating Committee of NBER said that "the evidence is not sufficiently strong at this time to determine whether or not a recession has begun".[2] In October 1979 they said "growth in the economy has apparently faltered in the period since the first quarter of 1979, .... [but] at this time, the various indicators examined by the Committee did not give a clear picture of the current state of the business cycle."[3] In December 1979, they still weren't sure.[4] In June 1980 they finally decided that the economy had peaked in January 1980, beginning a recession.[5] (However, it looks to me like the economy was sick starting in 1979.) In July 1981 they decided that the economy had troughed in July 1980.[6] I found all those links on this page. --Orlady (talk) 02:55, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I have renamed it to 'Late 1970s recession'. That suits the situation better. Gary King (talk) 03:08, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Relevant to that topic, a Congressional Research Service report on U.S. recessions since World War II says (on page 11): "The contraction of January 1980 to July 1980 lasted only 6 months. However, since the ensuing expansion was only 12 months long, many economists lump this recession and the 1981-1982 recession together." --Orlady (talk) 03:13, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Lumped together. I'd rather be missing a few minor recessions than to have a few that are completely incorrect. Gary King (talk) 03:32, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Next topic (going back in time) is 3 more missing recessions:
    NBER shows a recession in the 1969-1970 time frame. According to info in the paper by the Congressional Research Service (2002), the 1969-1970 recession was fairly mild in most measures, but was in a period of relatively high inflation.
    Before that, NBER shows a recession in 1960-1961 and an earlier one in 1957-1958. That Congressional Research Service paper reports (on page 11) that the 1957-58 recession had a GDP contraction of 3.7%, which appears to me to have been the largest contraction in U.S. GDP for any post-WWII recession. --Orlady (talk) 03:13, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't have time to research them all, but http://www.nber.org/cycles/ shows a bunch of additional officially defined recessions that aren't on the current list... If this list is going to call itself "comprehensive," I think it needs to account for all of these events in some manner. This might, of course, sometimes include lumping multiple recessions together (for example, the NBER lists the Great Depression as two separate downturns, but I believe it's fair to lump them together). --Orlady (talk) 03:32, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I have extended the Recession of 1953 to end in 1958. The primary thing that I want to keep in mind is that every recession that we list should have a comment explaining the reasons as to why the recession took place in the first place. Gary King (talk) 04:47, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    That doesn't work for me. The Congressional Research Service makes clear distinctions between those two recessions, only the first of which was related to the Korean War (sorry for the loss of indentation below):

    1953-1954. The 1953-1954 recession accompanied the winding down of the Korean War. The stated aim of the government was to offset reductions in military expenditures with reductions in taxes by letting wartime tax increases expire. If this could be done on a 1-to-1 basis, it would have no effect on the budget balance and would constitute a relatively neutral fiscal policy (it would be slightly contractionary since individuals would save some of their tax cuts). In fact, military and non-military spending was reduced more quickly than taxes, and the budget deficit actually shrank from 1.7% of GDP in FY1953 to 0.3% of GDP in FY1954. Thus, fiscal policy can be characterized as contractionary during the 1953-1954 recession since the budget’s automatic stabilizers would have made the deficit rise in the absence of policy changes. Monetary policy was eased right before the recession began, after becoming contractionary in early 1953 to counter what the Fed saw as the emergence of “a bubble on top of a boom.”25 After that point, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz characterize monetary policy during and after the recession as remaining relatively neutral.26

    1957-1958. Two years of tightening monetary policy was followed by an easing of policy at the end of 1957, after the 1957-1958 recession had begun.27 Fiscal policy was eased somewhat through higher government spending, but tax reductions were rejected on the basis that they would lead to unacceptably large budget deficits. The budget balance moved from a budget surplus of 0.8% of GDP in 1957 to a budget deficit of 0.6% of GDP in 1958 and 2.6% of GDP in 1959. But this easing did not exceed the amount provided by automatic stabilizers: the structural surplus was virtually constant from 1956 to 1958.28

    --Orlady (talk) 05:12, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Okay, updated. Gary King (talk) 05:30, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • I don't like being a "spoiler," but I continue to have concerns that this attractive list article is sloppy in terms of content. If I felt that I had some expertise in economic history, I'd probably try to expand the article to make it comprehensive, but I don't know enough about this topic to write about it appropriately. Here are some issues I see:
    I don't know if every one of these needs to be in this article, but when I read a featured list of financial crises, I want to believe that the list is comprehensive and authoritative. This list does not do that yet. --Orlady (talk) 02:12, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Would it make more sense to move it back to listing recessions only? Someone else, not me, moved it to 'financial crises', and that broadens the scope by quite a bit. Gary King (talk) 02:53, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Aargh! I didn't realize that was an undiscussed move by an editor who has not been involved with the article. (I figured that the discussion had happened somewhere not on my watchlist...) S/he's correct that "many of the events are not recessions." The new name does expand the scope, but it also means that it's not necessary to split hairs regarding the distinctions between "panics," "recessions" and other types of crises. If the article were still named "recessions," I would continue to be concerned that there are recessions on the NBER list that don't appear in this list article. --Orlady (talk) 03:19, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Alright, so where do we stand? I guess the list should continue to be built up from the new scope and the FL nomination be cancelled? (Since there is no way I will be able to 'complete' the list in the next few days or even weeks.) Also, a new scope would still have to be defined since a lot of events could fall under 'financial crises' I imagine. This list is doomed to failure, methinks... Gary King (talk) 04:08, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I've been doing some slow thinking on this... In many respects, I think it might be better to convert this back into a list of recessions. Inclusion of all kinds of financial crises creates an unfocused list. It appears that the difficulty with focusing on recessions is that the term is less and less well-defined as one goes back in history. "Panics" are much easier to identify. I keep thinking that there must be an economic historian's term that would cover the concept of "recessions and similar major economic setbacks" without inviting the inclusion of lesser events, such as individual bank failures, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the Savings and Loan Crisis, that fit the definition of "crisis". --Orlady (talk) 02:09, 12 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Do we have to remove any of the items on the list that would generally not be considered recessions before changing the article's title again? Gary King (talk) 04:57, 12 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't know the answer to that. I'm not an authority on this topic. I perceive that this is not an authoritatively comprehensive list of its topic, and I'm hoping that people more knowledgable than I am can help it become a comprehensive list. I do note that the lead explicitly defines the list's scope as broader than "recessions and depressions" ("This is a list of recessions, financial crises, and depressions that have affected the United States") -- and that language was there before the name was changed. --Orlady (talk) 22:04, 13 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment - For the period since 1854 that is covered by the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee, I think the list of recessions should be consistent with those identified by the NBER [7]. Earlier recessions would need to be added from other reliable sources. The present version of the list omits several of the recessions identified by the NBER. Cournot (talk) 23:01, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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