You can be forgiven if it’s hard to remember just how dark the economic future looked exactly eight years ago. The mind, after all, has a way of blocking out memories of trauma.

December 2008 was a month in which employers in the United States eliminated 695,000 jobs; the unemployment rate rose by half a percentage point on the way toward double digits; and entire industries, notably banks and the automobile sector, stood on the brink of collapse and were saved only through billions in federal bailouts.

Thursday, the Obama White House Council of Economic Advisers released its eighth and final “Economic Report of the President,” an annual book-length analysis of the state of the United States economy. It has a bit of a valedictory tone, which is to be expected given the contrast between where things stand today and when the administration began — and the desire of White House aides to put a positive spin on the Obama legacy.

But if you read carefully, you can also find in this 599-page document a road map to what has gone wrong in the Obama economy: where progress toward higher standards of living has been fleeting, or nonexistent, or has gone in reverse.