Macro Musings with David Beckworth Tyler Goodspeed on Challenging the Way Economists Look at Recessions
22 snips
May 11, 2026 
Tyler Goodspeed, former CEA chair and current chief economist, and author of Recessions, challenges how economists view downturns. He argues recessions are shocks, not inevitable cycles. He explores pattern-seeking mistakes, the plucking model, historical cases like 1873 and 2008, supply shocks, policy mistakes that amplify downturns, and why recessions differ across countries.
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Expansions Grew Longer But Recessions Stayed Constant
- Long-run expansions have lengthened steadily since 1700 with no clear policy breakpoints, while recession depth/duration stayed constant.
- Goodspeed cites revised NBER chronologies and Romer/Davis work showing earlier recessions were overstated.
Cycle Claims Often Reflect Apophenia
- Many purported business-cycle regularities are apophenia: humans impose patterns on randomness.
- Goodspeed tests cycles like Kondratiev, Kuznets, kitchen cycles and finds no statistical predictive power.
Yield Curve Is Not A Universal Recession Oracle
- The yield curve's predictive record varies across countries and eras and contains false positives/negatives.
- Goodspeed notes UK history shows many misfires and US inversions sometimes predicted recessions only due to later, unrelated shocks.
