Boom cycles - Interesting data?

[caracarn]

http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/30/news/economy/us-economy-boom-history/index.html?iid=hp-stack-dom

Ranking how our current boom sits in terms of length, I found it interesting that amongst all the issues of how bad times will come (and we know they will) how short these "bad" times have been for a long time now.  If you look through the list in this article what you see is:

• Beginning in 1982 - 1990 we had a good run
• Very quickly in 1991 - 2001 we had another
• A small hiccup in 2001 and we jumped into another run from 2001 - 2007
• Then we hit the Great Recession and then entered our current cycle from 2009 - ?

So over the last 35 years we;ve had about 4 years of "bad times".  And there is no debating if the Great Recession was uncomfortable but was it only "Great" because is lasted longer by far than anything else over the past 35 years?  The 70s were no fun with stagflation, double digit mortgage rates and the oil crisis and such so certainly we lived through a prolonged lack of sustained growth then, but all in all when looked at through this lens does it help to show that this concern of the next crash should be taken with a grain of salt?  Is there any reason to believe that the next crash will be any worse (lasting more than a couple years) before we just get things fixed again and move forward? 

I think that broader, optimistic view is something that Mustachianism allows us to see more clearly and appreciate.  Less focus on the news "hype" cycle and more on fundamentals that societies tend to continue to progress keeps people from panicking and selling everything when things fall.  Even though I lived through all this time directly, until I saw it laid out in one quick post, I was unaware of how amazingly upwards the trajectory has been for almost two generations.

Curious how others interpret this information.

[Cowardly Toaster]

I think MMM Himself has addressed this. If you're living a reasonable lifestyle, you're flexible, and smart, why ever fear hard times?

[Mississippi Mudstache]

I see that you're looking at periods of growth vs. recessions. There are other economic measures that are important for the early retiree. For example, you call the recession in 2001 a "small hiccup". For those who were dependent on their stock market portfolio at the time, that was hardly a hiccup. The S&P 500 shaved 50% after its March 2001 high, and wouldn't reach similar levels until May 2007. At the end of 2007, the bottom fell out once more, and the S&P wouldn't sniff 1500 again until early 2013.

That's 12 years of stagnating stocks for someone who retired in at the turn of the millenium, though it was a great time to be accumulating stocks. My stock accumulation began in earnest in 2012. I'm more concerned with the sequence of returns immediately after my retirement than I am with what happens in the market over the next 5 years.

[A Definite Beta Guy]

Sort of depends how you look at it. The dot-com bust and the early 90s recession were both accompanied by lengthy "jobless recoveries." The Great Recession didn't have a jobless recovery, but the unemployment rate was so high that it took a LONG time to recover. We also have a bunch of long-term unemployed that are only just coming back into the labor force.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

On the macro metrics, the 70s aren't anywhere near as bad as people remember and the 80s aren't anywhere as good. You can see 1984 "Morning in America" had 7.2% unemployment, which is pretty damn bad. The 70s probably only look bad because inflation and unemployment were both much much worse than the 60s that came before it.

The 1960s have macro-economic outcomes we're probably not going to see for a while, at least when you start adding in stuff like wage increases. We'd be in a pretty good spot if we could reduce our insane healthcare costs, though.

[caracarn]

Perhaps the Bezos plan will address healthcare in the long term.  Curious to see what these guys come up with and what impact it will have on the broader system.