A History of American Recessions

Alternate title: There used to be more recessions.

Here's a bit more on this chart:

The official designation of a recession comes from a committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private, nonprofit research organization. The committee considers a wide range of economy-wide, monthly data points, but the NBER views GDP as “the single best measure.” The committee calls a recession once there is a significant decline across these measures for more than a few months.

The NBER’s official designation of a recession, then, doesn’t happen until there are several months of data, allowing it to be sure both that a recession happened and when exactly it started. In other words, the NBER looks backward, not at the present moment.

Using this measure, here's a few insights:

• From 1855 to 2020, recessions lasted an average of 17 months. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the average recession has decreased to 14 months.
• The US' longest recession lasted 65 months from October 1873 to March 1879
• The US has gone through 13 recessions since WWII
• The longest recession since WWII was the Great Recession
• The shortest US recession was during COVID-19, from February to April 2020
• Although economic struggles and the Great Depression marked the 1930s, the NBER-defined recession lasted from September 1929 to March 1933.