A new survey that found a majority of people think the country is embroiled in a recession, even though the economy has seen resilient growth in output and employment, has raised new questions about what constitutes a recession.

The Harris poll for the Guardian released this week found that 56% of people believe the United States is experiencing a recession.

But, while households are reeling from the pain of inflation and may see the economy as performing poorly, it is not in recession, which is a term that has a specific meaning to economists.

“We’re nowhere near the notion of a recession,” Brian Marks, executive director of the University of New Haven’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program, told the Washington Examiner.

A recession is generally defined as a downturn during a business cycle when economic output is contracting and unemployment is rising. Usually, those are measured by gross domestic product and payroll jobs.

Other developments may immiserate the population without entailing a recession. Most notably, high inflation could sour perceptions of the economy even in the absence of a downturn. In theory, so could rising inequality or any number of other factors.

There is no official definition of a recession. To identify recessions, most economists and government agencies rely on business cycle dating by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private academic group. The NBER defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”

A historical rule of thumb is that two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth constitute a recession, although that isn’t always the case. There were two quarters of negative GDP growth in 2022, with the GDP falling at a 1.6% annual rate in the first quarter and a slight contraction in the second quarter. A recession wasn’t called because unemployment was still low.

Recessions are difficult to label because they aren’t typically known to be in that state until well after they have begun. For instance, it took until July 2021 for the National Bureau of Economic Research to put out a release noting that the brief recession at the start of the coronavirus pandemic lasted two months — a year after the recession had ended.

Today, both indicators, GDP and unemployment, are pretty far off from indicating a recession.

GDP expanded at a 1.6% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the first quarter of this year. That is a slowdown in growth that surprised investors, but it still shows the economy is expanding. GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2023 came in at a 3.4% seasonally adjusted annual rate. Additionally, the economy expanded by a healthy 2.5% for all of 2023.

The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s “GDP Now” tracker predicts that GDP growth in the second quarter of this year will clock in at 3.6%, according to the latest estimate.

The labor market has also shown signs of weakening but is still historically strong.

The economy has added an average of 242,000 payroll jobs a month for the past three months, well above the pace needed to keep unemployment trending down. The unemployment rate has remained below 4%.

Marks also said the natural rate of unemployment in the U.S., which is considered full employment, is usually between 4% and 6%, so the current 3.9% rate is not recessionary.

Still, the fact that the U.S. is not technically in recession does not mean that people are not hurting. Inflation has made life much less affordable, particularly for working-class voters. Higher interest rates, too, are crimping households’ abilities to buy homes, cars, or appliances, while also adding to their credit card debt.

High inflation and challenges with affordability are likely coloring people’s perceptions of other aspects of the economy. Nearly half, 49%, of the public believes unemployment is at a 50-year high despite the unemployment rate being near 50-year lows, according to the Harris survey.

Voters also think the stock market is in decline, with about half of those surveyed indicating that the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year. In fact, the S&P 500 is up 11% since the start of the year and up 27% over the past 12 months.

“I think there are a couple of things going on: One is the macroeconomics are very good, but individually, we’re still paying more than we did a couple of years ago for gas and groceries,” Peter Loge, director of the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, told the Washington Examiner.

Marks said “grocery basket-type issues” are partly to blame for perceptions of a poor economy. People have seen items at the store balloon over the past three years. They have also had to pay more for gas to fill up their cars than they did in early 2021.

This all has implications for the coming election, in which President Joe Biden is trying to win reelection and control of the House, and his presumptive challenger, former President Donald Trump, is trying to retake the White House and Senate.

“It’s certainly not good news for Democrats,” Loge remarked.

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The party in charge typically takes the blame for economic woes. So, despite Biden trying to convince voters that the economy is in good shape, polling shows that their perceptions of the economy are not. And in an election year, that is what matters.

A survey by the Cook Political Report shows that sour views on inflation far outweigh other economic variables in the minds of voters. When asked what the best markers of a strong economy are, just 13% of those polled said low unemployment, and 9% picked household income. A majority, 54%, now say cost of living is the best measure of the economy.