Economists may assert that we’re in the early stages of a recovery, but surveys continue to show that the impact of the Great Recession on American families is deep, widespread and grim. A Pew Research poll published last month indicated that more than half of all adults in the U.S. labor force had experienced some “work-related hardship” — a period of unemployment, a pay cut, a reduction in work hours or an involuntary move to part-time employment — since the recession began in December 2007. A report in March from the Population Reference Bureau showed that more than 70 percent of Americans age 40 and over felt they had been affected by the economic crisis. Government data indicate that the net worth of the average American household has shrunk by about 20 percent — the greatest such decline since the end of World War II. Long-term unemployment — joblessness lasting six months or more — is also at its highest level since the mid-1940s. According to recent data from the Rockefeller Institute, 20 percent of Americans have seen their available household income decline by 25 percent or more.

And yet, despite this bleak reality, some talk persists of silver linings: less cash to spend means less materialism, a real change to “the definition of living well,” as Jim Taylor, a vice president of Harrison Group, a market research firm in Waterbury, Conn., told The Times as the big banks melted down in the fall of 2008. At that time, unemployed Wall Street dads were said to be discovering the unexpected joys of domesticity. Minivan moms in the summertime learned that days at the public beach were just as rewarding as playing tennis while the kids improved themselves at foreign-language camp. The glue of all this new happiness was meant to be togetherness — a belief that still sustains reports that people are volunteering more, pulling together and even replacing their propensity to compete with their neighbors with a new spirit of cooperation and solidarity. “There’s a new level of social coordination,” says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, relating to me how parents of his acquaintance recently agreed to a multilateral halt in the escalation of kid-birthday-party madness in favor of back-to-basics cake and balloons. “In some areas of our life we’re resetting. Over time, we may get de-escalation.”

Image Credit... Human Empire

This glass-half-full narrative, the popular trope that the Great Recession will ennoble us by purging us of our excesses, has, as its reference point, the Great Depression — or a certain idea of the Great Depression. After all, we’ve been told countless times, the Depression put an end to the libertine individualism of the flapper age: families stayed home and played Monopoly, finding strength and sustenance with one another. Missing from this rosy picture, however, historians point out, is the fact that, as Steven Mintz, a Columbia University historian puts it, “they had no choice.” The atmosphere was often pretty rotten in those times of togetherness, he says, and many kids reacted by getting away from their parents as quickly as possible: “Teenagers who were unhappy with their families created a separate culture, a teenage culture, for the first time. Their family lives were unpleasant — their fathers were depressed — these kids separated themselves.”