As you might have noticed, we’ve been hearing happy talk about the economy since March, with a spate of optimism around the time of the bank stress tests.

Now comes an expert to tell us the recession is all over. The expert is Robert Gordon, a professor at North-Western, a famous macro-economist, and one of the seven members of the elite Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Analysis. Those are the people who officially date these things for the history book.

That does it for us. Dr. Gordon says it’s over. Whew. A close call that. What with the shipping industry in total bust, the truckers closing down, housing still in free fall, gold hovering in the $900s – almost double its value only 3 years ago – some of us had begun to worry. But nothing to see here, folks. Move right along. Dr. Gordon says we’re on track.

And what might be the reasoning behind this cheery thumbs up? Gordon says that in every recession since 1974, jobless claims peaked within weeks of the bottom of the recession, and that, says he, happened in early April this year. He also says that both in absolute terms (the total number of claims) and in relative terms (proportion of claims to the total work force) we haven’t exceeded the previous peak from the 1981-82 recession. In fact, in relative terms, we have just a bit over half of the jobless claims that were reported then.

If ever there were a suspect bit of reasoning in economics, this must be it.

How can anyone put such a burden on just one indicator?

And even that indicator is feeble, as it stands. The American economy bears a burden of debt far far greater than any in the early 1980s. The depth of the credit implosion has no precedent and the financial industry makes up a much greater proportion of the economy than it did then. The country was not involved in the 1980s in any war of the scale of the Iraq war. Nor was our spending on other things at the astronomic level it is today.

But even if you go along with this indicator, how can Dr. Gordon know for sure that jobless claims won’t make another peak? Because of patterns he sees in the chart, he says.

Am I reading something wrong here? Even your average garden astrologer has to come up with more patterns than that to make a claim.

Astrologers? Heck, even tea-leaf readers usually take a second or third squint at the muck at the bottom of the cup.