Whatever You Do, Don’t Say Recession
On his podcast this month, Joe Rogan, accompanied by his guest Chris Williamson (neither of whom, it goes without saying, are qualified economists or experts of anything other than spewing nonsense — Williamson is a self-professed “podcaster, Youtuber, and club promoter”), claimed that “The Biden Administration Redefined Recession.” A change on the Wikipedia entry for recession sparked Williamson to claim that the US is in a recession, but that the Biden administration is censoring the use of the word, and has even, 1984-style, changed its definition — Williamson states: “The reason that you attach a sequence of letters to something is to represent what that thing is. You don’t change reality by changing what those words actually mean. But if you can’t control the economy you might as well control the language.” Or as Rogan incongruously puts it, “Well that’s gaslighting.”
By the classical definition (two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth), America would be in a recession — Rogan and Williamson argue that this Wikipedia change has occurred at the behest of Biden so that the term recession can’t be used against them in the upcoming midterms, and though its true that recession is a weaponized term during election time, (a) they did not change the definition of recession and (b) the reason we aren’t hearing the Biden administration declare the US economy to be in a…
