New Yorkers wait to enter a job fair in 2009. Six years later, the country continues to feel the effects of the recession. PHOTOGRAPH BY Q. SAKAMAKI/REDUX

When will the Fed start to raise interest rates? Who will win the 2016 Presidential election? Obviously, these are two very different questions, but they are also connected. Without wanting to sound too much like the great historical materialist James Carville, I’ve always believed that politics is the flip side of economics, and vice versa, because they share a common framework.

In this case, the framework describes a country still feeling the after-effects of the deepest economic slump since the Great Depression. How can that be? Didn’t the recession officially end six years ago, in the summer of 2009? Yes, it did. That’s when the gross domestic product stopped declining and turned upward. The National Bureau of Economic Research, which adjudicates these things, decided that uptick in G.D.P. was sufficient to mark the recession’s trough. But the downturn was so drastic, and the recovery has been so moderately paced, that some of its consequences are still lingering.

You can see these consequences in the figures for wages and income, which show, for example, that the median U.S. household income in 2014 was still sitting about six per cent below the level it reached in 2007, the year the slump began. You can also see the consequences in polling data suggesting that many Americans believe the economy is still in recession. (More precisely, they thought this at the start of the year, which is when the most recent poll I could find on the subject was taken.) And you can see the consequences in the public hostility toward Wall Street, which remains largely undiminished.

As it happens, the economists who work on Wall Street also follow this issue closely, and in the past few days they’ve produced two pieces of research that both suggest that the economy won’t be fully recovered until 2017 or thereabouts, by which point we might well be justified in calling the previous ten years a “lost decade”—the phrase popularized by the economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff in their famous studies of past financial crises and their aftermath.

The first analysis that caught my eye, thanks to a story on Bloomberg Business, came from the economics team at Deutsche Bank. It looked at G.D.P. per person, which is perhaps the broadest measure of how an economy is doing. G.D.P. per person recovered to its 2007 level in the fall of 2013, which some analysts took as an indicator that things had returned to normal. The bank’s analysts beg to differ. They define a recovery “as being complete when all of the real output per capita that was lost as a result of the crisis (relative to the pre-crisis peak) has been recovered.” For instance, if the economy suffered a cumulative loss during the recession of ten per cent of G.D.P. (per person), relative to the 2007 level, it would have to make up that entire ten per cent before the rebound could be considered complete.

From this perspective, the recovery, attenuated as it has been, still has some ways to go. “If real GDP per capita continues to grow at its post-crisis rate of 1.4%, the output lost due to the crisis will only be fully recovered in Q4 2017, exactly ten years after the recession began,” the analysts write.

The other interesting update, from David Mericle, an economist at Goldman Sachs, looks at the labor market. After last week’s employment report, which showed that the economy created two hundred and eighty thousand jobs in May, it is tempting to assume that things are back to normal here, too. After all, in the past two years, the economy has created 5.6 million jobs—a fact highlighted in a recent blog post by Jason Furman, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers—and the official unemployment rate is now 5.5 per cent, down from a peak of ten per cent in October, 2009.

Mericle doesn’t deny that things have improved: no reasonable person could. He simply asks, “When will the labor market return to full employment?” Clearly, the answer to that question depends on how “full employment” is defined, but there is no universally agreed-upon definition of the term, except that it is meant to indicate the level at which inflation could be expected to start accelerating. Mericle’s interpretation employs a couple of reasonable-looking metrics: an official unemployment rate of five per cent, which is where the jobless rate sat in December, 2007, when the recession began, and an “underemployment rate” of nine per cent. The underemployment rate, as measured by the Labor Department, includes the unemployed, plus people working part-time for economic reasons and those “marginally attached to the labor force.” It provides a broader take on how the labor market is doing than the official unemployment rate, and it is watched closely by Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues.

Based on what’s been happening recently to G.D.P. growth, job creation, and labor-force participation rates, Mericle concludes that the official jobless rate will reach full-employment level in the first quarter of next year. But the underemployment rate won’t hit nine per cent until the end of 2016. And it won’t dip below the full-employment level, which is the point at which inflation could be expected to start accelerating, until the first quarter of 2017.

So what does all this mean for the two questions I started with, regarding when the Fed will raise interest rates and who will win the Presidential election?

As far as the Fed’s deliberations go, the new research provides more backing for Yellen’s “go easy” approach. Ever since she took office, she has made clear that she wants to give the economy plenty of time to recuperate, and that she is concerned about the danger of aborting the recovery by rapidly raising interest rates. That doesn’t mean the Fed won’t take any action at its September meeting: if job growth remains strong throughout the summer, it will probably go ahead and increase the federal funds rate by a quarter of a point. But the rate-hike process will be gradual and data-dependent. The threat of rising inflation is still pretty distant: it doesn’t provide a justification to rush things.

The 2016 election will, of course, turn on more than economics. But, because many Americans have yet to see the recovery reflected in their paychecks, the Republicans will seek to play up and exploit a general feeling of malaise. However, they also sought to employ this strategy in 2012, when the unemployment rate remained above 7.5 per cent. It didn’t work then, and it’s far from guaranteed to work next year. In order to persuade the American public that the G.O.P. has the wherewithal to raise living standards and move the country beyond the “lost decade,” the party will need to come up with some specific and fully costed proposals, of which there are currently few signs.

The Democrats, for their part, will be making the same argument that the Conservative Party in Britain made during the recent U.K. elections: “Steady as she goes. Things are getting better. Don’t let the other crowd return to power and wreck it.” As the Tories’ victory showed, this can be a powerful political message, especially if the opposition, and its candidate for leader, are widely perceived as incompetent or extremist.

It’s too early to say how the electorate will view the candidate who emerges from the Republican primary. But we already have some reliable data on public perceptions of the national party and its Washington-based leadership. According to a recent poll by Quinnipiac University, the Republicans in Congress have an approval rating of seventeen per cent.

Now, there’s a figure to put a smile on the face of James Carville.