What economy do you feel is harder, the post 2008 recession or the modern economy

In My Humble Opinion
1

this can be either for your personal life or how you feel the economy in general is.

I feel that in general the modern economy is harder for people. in the post 2008 crash as long as you had a good job you were mostly ok. there was a lot of U3 and U6 unemployment and underemployment, however if you had a stable job it was ok.

but I feel with inflation and wealth inequality that’s not the case anymore. We are in a K shaped recovery and I think only 20-30% of households are doing well now financially. People who have good, stable jobs have seen purchasing power erode as expenses go up and wages do not match them.

I feel like maybe 20-30% of people struggled after 2008, but now its more like 50%+ of people struggle in the modern economy. My personal finances are currently good, but I think overall its worse now than after 2008 because even people with steady jobs are struggling in the current inflation economy.

2

Equally IMHO, I agree the modern economy feels worse. There’s so much uncertainty, and a distinct feeling that not only are we near the cusp of a bubble (AI), but that even if it doesn’t crash, it’ll still put everyone’s job at risk.

Combine that with the war, the tariffs, and flat wages (example, my wife has had the same Sr Engineer Job for 4 years now and there’s been a single “raise” of 3% that was in the form of stocks and doesn’t vest for 2 more years!) and no one’s feeling secure. Plus higher interest rates, housing costs, rising vehicle prices due to reduction of lower cost options…

If I was younger (I’m in my early 50s) I’d be flat out terrified by what I see in the economy. As it is, I worry daily.

Frankly, back in 2008, I was financially hurt, worried, but generally hopeful that things would turn around sooner (couple of years) than later. Now, I’m worried that this is just the tipping point and it’s going to get a lot worse.

And I now have zero faith that the government would help or at least try to mitigate the issues. Now that bribery (despite denials) and corruption are legally acceptable options, with everyone near the top seeing how easy it is to buy your way through any civic responsibility…

Perfect storm of suck I might say.

3

2008 by 10000x, it’s not remotely close.

4

In my experience, 2008 was harder because it was harder to get jobs, although prices were decent. Today’s recession is that jobs are easier to get but prices are so inflated it’s almost impossible to make ends meet - but at least a job is a job.

5

I’m in general agreement, from my personal experience. I haven’t had a full-time job since June of 2024, and even when I was working full-time, I hadn’t had a raise since 2019. Thankfully, I’m in a position where I can pretty much retire, but if I were 5 or 10 years younger, I’d be very very nervous.

I can only tell you that, in my circle of friends and former colleagues, most of us over 50, the job market, especially in my fields (advertising and market research) is utterly atrocious. The big agencies have been cutting staffing for several years, and I know far too many smart, talented people who simply cannot find a job, at all.

The other thing I see now is that the housing market is fundamentally broken. Housing prices have risen dramatically since COVID, and mortgage rates are much higher; if you don’t have a house already, it’s very difficult to find an affordable house to buy – and if you’re stuck renting, rental prices have also gone through the roof.

6

I think now, from the persons looking for meaningful jobs, the outlook is worse than ‘08. The most frequently posted openings in my local market are long term as home health services workers. That seems like really the only viable choice for them in my town as a trend.

For me personally, I’ve had the same full-time job with benefits for three decades. I’m the lowest-income employed person in my neighborhood but have never been sad about that.

7

It’s hard to say as I didn’t have all the financial burdens I have now in 2008. My wife and I didn’t have kids and were still living in a 1 BR apartment.

2008 felt more like a one-time “black swan” event where the economy “broke” but it just required steps to fix it (and you can argue what those steps should be).

The current economy feels like a shift to a “new normal”. Whether our current leadership is a cause or a symptom of the current state of the world, I would say that it feels “harder” because it feels like this is the way things will be going forward. Like the constant message to the workforce is “we don’t need you”. Like the new economy is designed for CEOs and Silicon Valley techbros and Wall Street hedge fund people who don’t really do anything and perhaps anyone willing to devote their lives to serving them by eating shit 20 hours a day. But other than that the message is "we don’t want to hire you, we want to replace you with AI or outsource your job or just eliminate it and make everyone work harder, there is no career path or path to wealth for you.

I had heard that from a few friends who are in the advertising and marketing space. I wonder why that is? Surely there is still a need for people to convince people to buy all those stupid products we make every year?

8

I’m mostly watching from the (comfy) sidelines, but IMO this sums it up perfectly. Well done!

There’s a smash-and-grab being perpetrated on most advanced economies, but right now we’re in the lead of being smashed and grabbed. And anyone who’s not a 1%er is in significant danger of being smashed. Of course the 1% or even the 0.01% won’t escape the fallout of this unscathed.

This time the government won’t be helping to fix; it (or its corrupt rulers) are smashing and grabbing harder than anyone.

Profoundly dispiriting times.

9

I want to say “now” because a necessary part of our recovery is extricating ourselves from this war with Iran, and part of it is dealing with the economic effects of our burgeoning AI.

10

I think this post hit the nail on the head. 2008-2010 was at least understood to be a temporary dip that the economy would eventually recover from. Whereas what’s begun in Covid and continued til now feels like a permanent new normal. There is no sense that prices are going to come down, the economy will thrive again, or that any good change is around the corner.

11

Fair enough. Back in 2008 I was still in college. And even recently the only reason I was able to get hired was because I was applying for what was still basically bottom-rung work, albeit office-type work; I’m sure the increase in AI has also worsened the marketing hiring.

12

There’s still a need, of course, but people – especially smart, experienced people – are expensive.

There are two big things going on here:

The first is that ad agencies, particularly the big ones, are largely controlled by the financial guys (and, by extension, Wall Street) now. There were formerly five big advertising/media holding companies, which owned most of the big global ad agenices: Omnicom, Interpublic, WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu.

Omnicom and Interpublic merged a year ago, which led to three big, historically important agencies which had been part of Interpublic being shut down entirely: FCB (where I once worked), DDB, and MullenLowe. Somewhere between 15,000 and 23,000 jobs went away as a result of that merger.

But, even beyond that merger, the big agencies, and the mid-tier agencies, too, are now primarily focused on profitability for their owners and shareholders, and that means cutting overhead (and, thus, jobs, particularly the jobs of experienced, and expensive, employees).

That also leads to the second reason: AI. AI has been widely adopted across advertising, and not just for directly creating ads. It also has impacted agency functions like strategy, which was my role. You no longer need an experienced, thoughtful, insightful senior strategist (like me) to develop a creative brief, and guide the creatives. Now, you just need a junior strategist, and an AI tool, to come up with that. Is it as good? Very likely not, but it’s good enough, and a lot less expensive.

Similarly, jobs in the industry in which I spent the first decade of my career (and in which I still did work), market research, have been absolutely devastated by AI. “Synthetic research,” using AI to simulate focus groups or survey research, has taken over, because companies love that they no longer need to spend weeks and lots of money conducting actual research with actual consumers. I was talking last night with a dear friend, who has been a focus group moderator for 30 years, and she tells me that focus groups and other “qualitative” research is effectively dead. Most of the focus group facilities have closed up shop this year, and virtually no one is doing traditional research any more. Like with advertising, synthetic research is being seen as “good enough,” and it’s far cheaper and far faster.

13

It’s a hard question for me to answer because it reflects two completely different life stages. I entered grad school in 2009 and exited in 2011. Those two years were basically spent acquiring student loan debt, at a not very good interest rate. We didn’t have much money. I remember being unemployed after grad school but I don’t know if it was the market or undiagnosed ADHD or my relative inexperience that made it so difficult to get a job.

Now we have a much bigger income but additional financial burdens, such as my son’s medical expenses. We bought a condo this summer which was really the first time we could afford to move. We still haven’t sold the manufactured home we lived in, which means we still have to pay lot rent and insurance on it.

Once again we were stuck with a shitty interest rate, as the condo more than doubled our housing expenses. But until then we’d been saving 60% of our income.

Increased costs suck, but until I’m only paying for one place to live I can’t get a clear view of our current financial situation. I notice I’ve been going over budget on groceries and gas every month, and right now I can’t find the money for retirement, but I view that as temporary. We now have a pile of money to get through times like this that we didn’t have before.

So, I don’t know. Each impacted us in different ways because of different life circumstances.

14

Thats my view. I feel like in 2008 as long as you had a stable job you were mostly ok. But now it feels like the entire economy is stacked against you even if you have a stable job. Mass unemployment from AI, inflation, income inequality, etc all mean that prices keep going up but wages stay stagnant. If you had a stable job in 2009 you were mostly ok but if you have a stable job in 2026 inflation has eaten up most of your wages and you struggle.

15

True, but one thing I didn’t have in 2008 is investments, and so far those have been doing incredibly well.

Because of market performance, for many people I think it’s kind of a mixed bag whether they are doing better or worse.

16

Honestly, this has been the saving grace for me, over the past few years. My IRA has been doing exceptionally well, though this year has been bouncy, due to the Iran war’s effect on the market.

18

It’s really hard for me to judge. In 2008 I was facing divorce, foreclosure, and bankruptcy. It took me 10 years to get back on my feet. Today I feel like I’m on firmer ground but I’m far less optimistic about the future. 2008 hit me much harder, but there was an end to it in sight. In 2026 I can absorb more damage, but I don’t feel like it’s going to get better anytime soon.

19

This is true. Unfortunately, given the political idiocy, it looks possible the investment rosy era will quickly end at some point and stocks will nose-dive. When that happens, people will be hit by a triple whammy: Hard to get jobs, prices are very high, and investments have tanked, too.

20

You had better hope prices DON’T come down, as that would be the result of DEflation, which is typically a Very Bad Thing. But people don’t understand what inflation actually is, and should be (optimally), as in a small but steady increase in the costs of goods and services. That’s why the Dems lost in '24, people saw that say their bread was STILL say $4 a couple of years post the COVID inflation event (having gone up from $3), and were pissed that it didn’t go BACK to $3, vs. remain around $4 (the new normal).

21

Yes, and that will suck for a significant subset of people. But I’m hoping, at age 43, I can take the hit. I’m not retiring for at least another 20 years.

These are hard times but I feel it’s more difficult to define how than it was in 2008. Maybe because our income insulates us from some of the shock. There’s a big difference between “I can’t pay my bills” and “I’m saving less money.”

Occasionally I poke around looking at other jobs in grant writing and management, and it does look bleak there. I sometimes feel stuck at my current job. I have a lot of work-related anxiety in part because I don’t really feel I have any other options and I’m scared, often irrationally scared, of losing the job I have. If I lost the job I have I’m not confident I could easily find a new one. There are times I’ve thought about exiting the work force temporarily to better help my son, or I’ve worried about having to home school him. We can’t afford it and I’m not sure I’d ever find a job again.