Americans are 40% poorer than before the recession

"Recession" means that GDP is shrinking, not growing. That's the definition of that word:

noun: recession; plural noun: recessions

1. a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.

So technically, the recession is over. There's not much room for interpretation there unless you choose a different definition of "recession".

All of the bad stuff you listed are symptoms of an empire in decline as well as a massive change in how the economy works. Industrialization changed the world and so will computers and information related technology. We're right in the thick of things. We don't know how things will turn out in the long term - that's for historians 200 years from now to figure out.

It looks like this period of drastic change will be a mixed bag. People being put out of work by automation puts pressure on the labor market. Educational systems set up in a bygone era are failing to adapt. People are having fewer children and living longer which puts stress on everything from social security to labor markets.

It will probably just take a while for society to sort all of this out. And it may or may not suck in the meantime. I think most people reading this will be just fine and probably live really nice lives. Also it'd be nice if the USA and China could avoid a war/proxy wars while trying to figure out the new world order.

flagkilled seems a bit much for that comment? Any reason why his joke was deleted?

The trouble is when nominal value shrinks, it shackles people to endless cycles of debt slavery. Either that or people default, which causes follow-on cascades of defaults.

If we had a low-debt cash-only economy this might not be the case, but our economy is so far from that it's not even worth talking about. We are absolutely a credit economy, and when the numbers get smaller in a credit economy pretty much everything breaks.

Eventually the collapse of the middle class will drag down everything else, including the rich.

I periodically see these press releases from places like AEI (the American Enterprise Institute) and similar trying to argue that the loss of wealth for the average American is some kind of illusion and "things have never been better."

Reminds me of the stories I've read about the glory days of the former USSR. As collectivized farming failed, Pravda printed endless stories about how farm yields were exploding. People read these stories as they starved. I'm sure the cognitive dissonance was almost comical.

There's something oddly Soviet about the self-assured parallel universe fantasizing of American conservatism. I'm sure it's from decades and decades of fanatical anti-Communist propaganda warring. You become that which you fight.

It takes about 10 minutes on Google to conclude that, regardless of any technical definition of a "recession", the economy is terrible unless you you're in a handful of industries or happen to make your money by owning the means of production (shocking that the group for whom the system is named always seem to do just fine...)

Here's a good example:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

Some groups have actually seen their real wages fall over time, even since '09. If your wages are falling, then your economy is contracting, that's a recession. Over-aggregating and being pedantic about technical definitions adds nothing to the conversation, just like saying "my wages have gone up, therefore things are fine" adds nothing to the conversation (not saying you did the latter).

Edit: I'm not saying accuracy in terminology is never a good thing, if you're writing an academic or professional article then, by all means, be precise. But this isn't that kind of forum, so significant contextual inference is called for.