The National Bureau of Economic Research has documented 33 recessions since 1857, including a few major ones that are easily identifiable in the chart above: a) three severe contractions in the 1865-1880 period following the Civil War (with the third one lasting more than five years) and accompanied by a 20-year period of below-average economic growth, and b) the Great Depression with two official recessions (August 1929 to August 1933; and May 1937 to June 1938) and a ten-year period of below trend growth in output. Despite the vagaries of the business cycle, unexpected periods of recessions, a civil war, two world wars, a Great Depression, etc., there's one thing we can always count on in the long-run: 2% real growth in per-capita GDP, meaning that that output per person in the U.S. doubles every 35 years, or about twice during the average person's lifetime.
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