OK, someone had the idea of a Tale of Two Economies long before I did.
It was 1993, and the person was a student of the First Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith:
Reputable economic attitudes hold that the economic norm is high, if not quite full, employment and a reliable rate of expansion in economic output. Recessions are an aberrant departure from that norm. Correction must come. The question after nearly three years is whether this is so. Or is it possible that the economy has settled into an underemployment equilibrium of small or negligible growth?
There is no great novelty in this suggestion. It happened in the Great Depression: there were 10 years of stagnation that ended not because of any internal dynamic but from the massive spending for the war. And one mildly esoteric branch of economic thought has long allowed for the possibility of an enduring underemployment equilibrium, of stability with high unemployment, of low or negligible economic growth.
One must, however, challenge all accepted attitudes on the next point. It is that recession is uniformly adverse in its effect and thus by everyone deplored. A great many people and an even higher proportion of those who have political voice and vote, though perhaps not a majority, find a recession quite comfortable, and certainly more so than the measures that do anything effective about it. This, however, no one dreams of saying.
