Nickeled and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich The Boom was a Bust for Ordinary People "So thoroughly is the economy decoupled from ordinary experience that according to a CNN <https://webmail.ic.gc.ca/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Cable%2BNews%2BNetwork%2BLP%2BLLLP?tid=informline> poll, 57% of Americans thought we were already in a recession a month ago. Economists may complain that this is only because the public is ignorant of the technical definition of a recession, which specifies at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. But most of the public employs the more colloquial definition of a recession, which is hard times. And - far removed from whatever happens on Wall Street, the Nikkei, Dax, or the curiously named FTSE - most Americans have been living in their own personal recession for years. I could see this when I was doing research for a book on white-collar unemployment in 2004. Although the economy was officially on an upturn, I met laid-off people who'd been searching for a job for more than a year and often ended up - after selling their homes and borrowing from relatives - taking low-wage work as big-box sales clerks or even janitors."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/01/AR2008020102828.html <https://webmail.ic.gc.ca/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/01/AR2008020102828.html>
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