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650 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2013)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0650 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION
Evaluating the
Effects of the
Great Recession
By
SHELDON DANZIGER

The Great Recession, as officially dated by
the   National   Bureau    of  Economic
Research, lasted from December 2007 through
June 2009.1 It was the most severe recession
since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with
both gross domestic product (GDP) and the
number of jobs declining by about 6 percent
and median family incomes by about 8 percent.
It lasted longer (18 months) than any recent
recession and was precipitated by a collapse in
housing values and stock prices that negatively
affected the economic well-being and security
of most U.S. families.
Although the recession officially ended four
years ago, the economy has yet to fully recover.
In July 2013, the national unemployment rate
was 7.4 percent, below the October 2009 peak
rate of 10.0 percent, but well above the prere-
cession November 2007 rate of 4.7 percent.2
These monthly, point-in-time unemployment
rates understate the percentage of workers who
experienced any unemployment during the
Great Recession era. That is, in any month,
some of the unemployed find new jobs while
other workers are laid off, so the number expe-
riencing unemployment increases over time
even if the flows into and out of jobs leave the
unemployment rate unchanged. Farber (2011)
documents, that 16 percent of all workers expe-
rienced a job loss at some time during the
Sheldon Danziger is president of the Russell Sage
Foundation. When this volume was prepared, he was
H. J. Meyer Dis tinguished University Professor of Public
Policy and director of the National Poverty Center at the
Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of
Michigan. He is a John Kenneth Galbraith Fellow of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science.
NOTE: Larry Bartels, Alan Blinder, Sarah Burgard,
Andrea Campbell, Ariel Kalil, Lucie Kalousova, Lindsay
Owens, Robert Moffitt, Fabian Pfeffer, Matthew
Rutledge, Michael Sances, Luke Shaefer, and Sarah
Turner provided valuable comments on a previous draft.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716213500454

ANNALS, AAPSS, 650, November 2013

6

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