DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU: The Die-Hard Recession Heads Off The Charts. “You can see at a glance that the pink line indicating the current recession — yes, that one down near the bottom of the chart — is an outlier in the group. It shows that by the 43rd month of the downturn, the ratio stood at just over 58 percent, meaning that 58 percent of the population was employed. That figure is 4.6 percent less than at the recession’s start, when more than 62 percent were working. And it means that this employment decline is steeper, deeper, and longer than in any of the previous five recessions by a long shot. Even in the two worst recoveries during the past forty years, this ratio never before declined by more than three percent.”