If the weight of "ancient" history asserts itself, Governor-elect Scott Walker's goal of 250,000 new jobs in Wisconsin by 2015 appears well within reach.

If the last 20 years tell the story, he's in trouble.

Nothing's certain here. Talk to five different economists and you hear five different perspectives. Likewise, while the typical business cycle is recession and recovery, there's no guarantee that this recovery will be typical.

"We all wish the governor good luck, because the state can use the jobs," said John Heywood, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Arguing the case - more or less - for Wisconsin to be able to sprout another quarter of a million jobs is Terry Ludeman, retired chief labor economist for the state. Wisconsin shed about 200,000 jobs during the recession; a standard recovery should restore that naturally and take the state most of the way to the 250,000-job target, Ludeman said.

"It seems like a fairly moderately easy goal to hit," he said. "That's where we should be, anyway."

Nationally, most recoveries since World War II have produced the rate of job growth needed to achieve Walker's goal.

It happened in just 29 months after the recession of the mid-1970s, and within 28 months of the recession that ended in November 1982 - the post-World War II downturn closest in severity to the one we're now exiting.

The problem is what's happened more recently.

For Wisconsin to reach Walker's goal, employment will have to expand by about 9%. It took the state 43 months, and the country as a whole 55 months, to post such growth after the recession of the early '90s.

In the next downturn, things got worse. The recovery after the 2001 recession never showed anything close to 9% employment growth in either Wisconsin or the nation. That period was quickly labeled a "jobless recovery," Heywood noted.

"But this one," he added, "is putting that one to shame."

Fifteen months into the last jobless recovery, Wisconsin still stood 5,000 jobs short of what it had when the recession officially ended. Fifteen months into the current recovery, Wisconsin is down 22,000 jobs.

An interactive chart on the web page of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis dramatically displays the trajectories for the first year and a half of post-war recoveries. Before 1990, the lines showing employment gains look like mountain slopes. Since then they look like open recliners.

A big productivity boost after the 2001 recession helped stunt job growth then, said Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution in Washington. Now, he said, companies that slashed employment in a virtual panic after the financial crisis of 2008 seem to have found they can get by with less staff.

"I think that's part of the surprise" with the current sluggish recovery, he said.

Ludeman said mature firms in particular learn to do more with less during a recession - and those are the types of companies that dominate Wisconsin.

"Our economic development polices have not brought the new gazelles, the new technology firms into Wisconsin," he said. "We've more relied on our older firms, and they're not going to give us the same bounce-back."

Walker is talking about changing that. Along with adding 250,000 new jobs, he has said he will develop strategies for creating 10,000 new businesses by 2015.

That, however, could be even harder than increasing the jobs.

According to Census Bureau surveys, from 2002 through 2007 - five years of an expanding economy - Wisconsin added about 3,100 business establishments with employees. That amounted to growth of 2.3%.

The growth for the United States as a whole during that period: 25.9%.