Tim Kane at the Kauffman Foundation is out with his latest survey of economics bloggers (full disclosure: I am both an adviser to the survey and a participant in it).
My favorite feature is a word cloud of adjective that respondents offered to an open-ended question about the U.S. economy:
Uncertainty still reigns (as it should), but “recovering”, “improving”, and “growing” now hold some prime real estate. As do “fragile” and “precarious.”
In last quarter’s survey, “uncertain” was even larger, with “weak” and “sluggish” close behind:
This should be a new CEA data memo.
I think that this shows the toll that the business cycles can take on the mentality of Americans. The long recession has crushed any dreams people once had of returning to a stable economic state. Although some are starting to think positively, there is still a large amount of fear that the recovery we need is not coming.