"This recession is the deepest in our lifetimes, the deepest since 1929. If you take the people thrown out of work in the 1982 recession, the 1991 recession, the 2001 recession, not only is this bigger, this is bigger than all of those combined"
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Goolsbee is doing something economists rarely get credit for: storytelling with numbers. The line is engineered to make abstraction feel physical. “Deepest since 1929” isn’t just a data point; it’s a cultural flashbang. The Great Depression sits in the American imagination as the benchmark of institutional failure, breadlines, and broken trust. By invoking it, he’s not forecasting doom so much as justifying extraordinary action in the present.
The second move is even sharper: he corrals three recent recessions (1982, 1991, 2001) that many listeners remember personally, then stacks them like bodies. That comparison is designed to outflank the complacent, familiar script of downturns-as-weather. If you’ve lived through one recession, you might assume you know the drill: tighten belts, wait it out. He’s warning that the drill won’t work here. The repetition of “bigger” is deliberate blunt force, a rhetorical substitute for charts and footnotes.
Subtextually, this is policy advocacy in plain clothes. In the context of the 2008-09 financial crisis, “thrown out of work” centers job loss over Wall Street’s balance sheets, reframing the crisis as a mass social injury rather than a technical market event. It’s also a preemptive defense against the inevitable backlash: if government moves look unprecedented, that’s because the situation is being framed as unprecedented. The urgency is the argument.
The second move is even sharper: he corrals three recent recessions (1982, 1991, 2001) that many listeners remember personally, then stacks them like bodies. That comparison is designed to outflank the complacent, familiar script of downturns-as-weather. If you’ve lived through one recession, you might assume you know the drill: tighten belts, wait it out. He’s warning that the drill won’t work here. The repetition of “bigger” is deliberate blunt force, a rhetorical substitute for charts and footnotes.
Subtextually, this is policy advocacy in plain clothes. In the context of the 2008-09 financial crisis, “thrown out of work” centers job loss over Wall Street’s balance sheets, reframing the crisis as a mass social injury rather than a technical market event. It’s also a preemptive defense against the inevitable backlash: if government moves look unprecedented, that’s because the situation is being framed as unprecedented. The urgency is the argument.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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