Is America in a Depression or a Recession?

I read the article, “You Say Depression, I Say Recession.’Are We Talking about the Same Thing?' "By Juliet Lapidos. In this essay, Lapidos enlightens the uninformed reader about the differences between a depression and a recession; recession being a "significant decline distributed across the economy lasting more than a few months, usually visible in the numbers for GDP, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales" and a depression being "a grave, prolonged recession during which the GDP declines by more than ten percentage points."

Since the essay was written in order to help the reader determine the differences between a depression and a recession, the voice of this essay is very informative and somewhat casual, mainly quoting facts that she had obtained from major businesses and corporations. However, at one point of the essay, there seems to be a change of topic. Even though the author still is discussing a depression, she writes about the Finnish depression. The whole article appeared to inform the reader about America and its current economic issues, but the author chose to include three sentences in the essay about the Finnish economy. I found this to be strange and somewhat out of place.

The tone of the article was witty at some points and also sarcastic at others. When the author discusses the differences between the definitions of a depression and a recession, she does this in an intelligent way by quoting sources and backing up her information. When the author writes about Ronald Reagan and his remarks about Jimmy Carter correcting him, lead the reader to read the essay with a more sarcastic tone. If you don’t know the differences between a depression and a recession, I’d advise you to read this short article.

http://www.slate.com/id/2201249/