You have read it in black and white: the economy is improving: Factories are hiring. Adding 200,000 jobs in December cut the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Consumer confidence is rising, and cars are selling again.

Meanwhile, corporate profits hit a record $2-trillion a year, and since the cataclysm in 2008, real gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services, has grown for more than two years.

These economic measures are broad, ubiquitous and reliable, but there are other ways to measure the economy. If you poke around, you’ll find economists — on Wall Street and Elm Street alike — with their own idiosyncratic economic indicators.

Like the GDP and unemployment rate, many are less forecasting tools than measures of the current economy. That may diminish their prognostic value, but not their human-humorous-interest value.

To stay or to vacate?

Vacations, however necessary, can be expensive, and so when the economy tanked in 2008, we began to hear about the cost-cutting “staycation.” By taking time off from work (assuming we had a job…) without leaving home, we could enjoy friends, family and local attractions: parks, museums, lakes and beaches.

We could, in other words, enjoy many of the benefits of a vacation while ducking the hefty price tag. Staycations can have pizazz: would you rather be taking off your shoes in a frenetic airport or building a tree house with the kids?

We failed to find anybody who studies staycations, so the best we can say about their merit as economic indicators is that past performance is no guarantee of future success; read the full prospectus before investing!

Vacant at home

It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce from foreclosure stats or photos of abandoned houses that housing remains a black hole in the American economy. But like the staycation, a foreclosure boom follows a sour economy, and is more informative about the immediate past than about the immediate future.

We were, however, intrigued to learn that foreclosure could be a disease vector. Clouds of mosquitoes are breeding in abandoned ponds and swimming pools at foreclosed homes in Arizona.

That gives us another reason to hate skeeters, even if their whine is the sound of love.

Sports: No rush to the finish line

Pro-sport tickets are not cheap, so a full stadium must signify a healthy economy. But it ain’t necessarily so, says Andrew Billings, who studies broadcasting and sports at the University of Alabama. “People often get a flawed picture from simply going by attendance figures. It depends on the sport.”

In the National Football League, he notes, “the majority of stadiums sell out, and demand far exceeds supply.” Before a sick economy leads to empty seats, he says, it deflates ticket prices on resale markets, “but you will still see a full stadium, and may think the economy must not be too bad, even if the demand is cut in half.”

And don’t bother counting duffers at a private golf course, either, Billings says. A full golf course “is not always a straight-off indicator of prosperity,” because the major expense is the cost of membership. “For many people, once they have bought the membership, the costs are sunk, and golf becomes the cheap option for entertainment.”

When money is tight, he says, “They may be playing twice as frequently because it’s already paid for.”

Big screen, big sales, bogus economic indicator?

You might think sales of pricy electronic goods, including those “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” TVs, would closely track prosperity, but Billings says they “may be another misleading measure.”

Many of those giant video screens, more suited to aircraft hangers than living rooms, are bought to watch sports, and looking at the full economic picture reveals the folly of the sales = prosperity equation, he says.

Consider the cost of season tickets for big-league sports — up to $20,000 for a seat behind home plate at the New York Yankees. When times get bad, Billings says, “The buyer may think, ‘Why don’t I get a $2,000 TV and the major-league baseball package? Once you add in parking and food, sports can be very expensive, and that makes the flat screen look pretty cheap.”

Although another flat-screen sale may contribute to the image of prosperity, Billings says, this fan “has really cut their budget to avoid going to the stadium.”

Pretty Byzantine?

How do we get a measure of economic activity in the long, dark epoch before the invention of the GDP or the flat-screen television? In the 14th century, during the death throes of the Byzantine empire, the church was an economic engine and a wealth center. If you bought a marriage license, you paid the church, which also owned buildings, even entire communities.

Because churches hold some of the best documents from the period, some scholars have proposed using records of church wealth as a proxy for economic development — or decline — during this benighted epoch before the spreadsheet was envisioned.

Garbage everywhere

With the possible exception of unwrapped broccoli from a local farm, everything you buy creates garbage, and the garbage disposal system is always affected by economic slowdowns.

Duh.

But we were surprised to hear that garbage can offer almost a real-time economic readout. According to Edward Humes, author of the forthcoming book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, “Until the housing bubble burst, the largest landfill in the country, by intake, was Puente Hills in Los Angeles County, which was taking up to the legal limit, 13,000 tons per day. This was cut in half after the housing bubble burst. Home construction and demolition debris fell as construction stopped, and people started buying less stuff.”

Construction fell so quickly, Humes says, that “Landfill operators probably saw [bad economic] things coming ahead of a lot of the rest of us.”

Even “durable goods” can quickly start bulking up the garbage stream, he says. “So much of what we buy is pretty ephemeral, even the stuff defined as durable goods must last just one year. A lot of it is designed to be thrown away; not fixed. The age of the TV repairman is long behind us.”

Garbage tells us about more than just economics, Humes adds. “It’s a little scary, one of our greatest exports is trash. We used to make things, and now we make trash.”

Although high garbage flows correlate to prosperity, Humes says the linkage cannot last forever. “Every culture figures out” that wasting resources is not a long-term solution, he says. “Suddenly, when resources are scarce, humans get more conscious of how much they have wasted, but by then it’s too late.”

Night lights, big city

Can lights at night, as seen from space, measure a region’s economy? After all, lighting requires bulbs, generators, energy and wires, so the argument has face validity. But a 2011 study returned mixed results. Night lights were a useful gauge in 25 percent to 33 percent of counties in the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). In India, night lights gave a useful picture of local GDP in a “very small number” of districts.

And in China, fewer than 10 percent of districts showed a significant correlation between night lights and GDP. One reason: light from the intense coastal urbanization overwhelmed the satellite’s sensors and could not be measured accurately.

Underwater underwear

Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve for oh-so-many years, was said to favor sales of men’s underwear as an economic indicator. His theory: When times get tight, men decide to forgo the pleasure of a new pair of briefs or boxers.

We were unable to unearth evidence for this notion, but wish to ask two follow-up questions: Do sales of women’s underwear convey an economic message? And how do you know?

Stick with lipstick?

If men can withstand the urge to buy boxers and briefs, women apparently can’t cut back on “small indulgences” like lipstick. In 2001, the chair of Estee Lauder coined “lipstick index” to explain why lipstick sales rise during a bad economy.

Going to war

For some, the military is a job of last resort, and so the number and quality of new recruits offers a proxy for economic conditions.

But military recruiting ads may be just as telling as the numbers. In 2009, the New York Times described a new Marines ad showing “men crawling through mud and under barbed wire, being smacked in the head with padded fighting sticks, vomiting after inhaling tear gas and diving, boots and all, into a swimming pool.”

With so many potential recruits in the job market, the ad didn’t bother soft-selling the rigors of Marine life.

Recouping the coupons

When pressed for coins, why not cash in on those coupons that clutter mailboxes and newspapers? In hard times, coupon redemptions do rise, according to a company that processes them.

Skirting the economic reality?

If we can believe QI, a quiz show from the United Kingdom, long hair and short skirts are both signs of prosperity. Hey, we tried, but failed, to track this revelation back to a legit study, but still give thanks to reader “St Ga” for the suggestion, and for an elegant mix-mastering of cause and effect: “If the government makes short skirts & long hair compulsory for EVERYONE will the economy improve? :)”

We wish.

The “tragedy of the commons” is an old problem in ecology: if all the villagers can graze their cows on the village commons, they are likely destroy it by over-grazing.

Ironically, maximizing individual income harms everybody in the long run. Fisheries and irrigation supplies are also prone to the tragedy of the commons, and that raises a question: What conditions are most likely to prevent the tragedy and maximize production?

For a new study, Marco Janssen, a assistant professor of human evolution and social change at Arizona State University, and colleagues built a video game designed to mimic a natural productive system.

In nature, plants and animals can reproduce to fill “ecological niches” – but only if the niches are open and close to existing plants and animals. The same rules pertained in the game: tokens “grow” the fastest when open squares touch several occupied squares.

Rules of the road

In an experiment on resource use, green stars (tokens) represent resources; the circles represent the players. Tokens grow fastest in cells with four occupied neighbors. Tokens cannot "grow" in occupied cells, or in cells lacking neighboring tokens. Players use arrow keys to move; the space bar captures a token. | Courtesy Science/AAAS

To determine what circumstances would allow the players to capture the most tokens and get the highest return, the researchers varied the rules governing player behavior. In some trials, players could communicate with each other via text message. In other trials, players could punish others who misbehaved by charging them one token. In some trials, players could both communicate and punish; in other trials they could do neither.

Without changing the rules controlling token growth, the researchers then measured how much of the resource the players could capture during six, four-minute trials with different rules on player behavior.

Simply vacuuming up all the tokens as fast as possible produced the smallest harvests, because there was no place for new tokens to grow. Yet in the absence of communication, vacuuming was the ideal strategy for each player, even though they all participated in a tragedy of the commons.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s talk!

When the participants could communicate before each trial, they often discussed strategy. “Typically they decided, ‘We should not harvest immediately, we should let the resource grow a little bit,’” Janssen says. “Most groups decided to split the resource into individual areas, and, 30 seconds before the end, to take as much as they could; it’s best for earnings to end up with nothing on the board.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The most productive strategies all involved communication, which helped the players “understand the setting better, develop a group feeling, and develop some rules,” Janssen says. “I hope this will stimulate people to look at what make communications effective. There has not been much study on that” in research on using resources.

Punishment, typically used to retaliate for misbehavior, caused mistrust and reduced both cooperation and total harvest. But punishment was tricky, even when combined with communication, Janssen found. “It might be good to have communication with an option to punish, but if you actually use punishment, it may reduce mutual trust. But if you cannot use the stick, people may not cooperate. You have to be very careful when you use force.”

In 1912, the steamship Titanic sank after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic, killing 1,517. In 1915, the passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine 15 kilometers off the shores of Ireland, killing 1,313.

In both cases, about 32 percent of the passengers survived, but the Lusitania sank in 18 minutes, while the Titanic took two hours, 40 minutes to go under.

In both cases, the timing may have increased the overall death toll: The Lusitania started listing almost immediately, making the lifeboats difficult to enter and launch. The Titanic, woefully short of lifeboats, sank slowly, and as a result some lifeboats departed partly empty because some passengers were slow to understand that the “unsinkable” vessel was sinking.

Both captains commanded that women and children have first access to the lifeboats.

Although the passenger death rate was similar on both ships, a new study suggests that the timing played a role in which passengers survived and which perished. The quick sinking of the Lusitania resulted in a more even-handed culling, while the slower pace of the Titanic disaster allowed two processes to take place:

• A “pro-social” sorting allowed the ethos of “women and children first” to be enacted on the Titanic, but not the Lusitania. While both men and women aged 16 to 35 survived at a higher rate on the Lusitania (as would be expected by their superior average fitness), women in general on the Titanic were 53 percent more likely to survive than men. Children on the Titanic were 31 percent more likely to survive than adults age 36 and above.
• A less beneficent process allowed the richer, first-class passengers more access to the lifeboats on the Titanic, taking advantage of their greater access to crew members who directed the evacuation, and the location of the lifeboats near the first-class staterooms. Titanic’s first-class passengers were 44 percent more likely to survive than third-class passengers.

The results on the Titanic do not mesh with standard economic models that describe the human as essentially a selfish beast, says study author Benno Torgler, a professor of economics at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

Torgler points to another exception from the grim economic picture of pure competition. “Studies of persons caught in situations such as a fire in a night club or a stampede during a rock music concert indicate that a great majority of involved persons did not engage in a ruthless competition. Cooperative rather than selfish behavior was predominant.”

Money talks, even on a sinking ship!

We’re happy to see chivalry at work on a sinking ship, but why did the Titanic’s lifeboats carry an unexpected number of rich passengers? “Time not only allows the social norms to emerge but also social power,” says Torgler. “The well-to-do first class passengers had better access to information about the imminent danger and were aware that the lifeboats were situated close to the first class cabins … and likely tried to obtain the same preferential treatment with respect to lifeboat access as they generally were used to receiving onboard for all other items. People with higher incomes and greater wealth are used to giving orders to employees (in this case the crew), are better informed, and are willing to bargain in the extreme, even offering financial rewards to obtain what they want.”

Sound familiar?

And why should we care?

The shipwrecks are close to a century old, and when the jetliners that have replaced ocean liners go down, there’s seldom time for selfishness or chivalry. So why bother thinking about behavior in such extreme conditions? “These events demonstrate that the behavior of individuals in disaster events does not follow the traditional mythology of mass panic,” wrote Torgler. “Knowing how humans behave under extreme conditions allows us to gain insights about how varied human behavior can be, depending on differing external conditions.”

When disaster plans are written for cities, nations and institutions, they might as well be based on reality, Torgler adds. “Better disaster plans which take into account actual human behavior will improve the survivability of individuals and ultimately lower the economic costs to all. To do this, society needs a better understanding of actual human behavior in disaster events, based upon scientific research and not on popular myth and misconception.”

More specifically, it helps — if possible — to give people time to think. “Strategies dealing with disasters and evacuation could take the time aspect into account. If you give individuals enough time, pro-social behavior” will appear.

But the wreck of the Titanic also indicates a darker side, Torgler adds. “Social power will also emerge in a stronger manner.”

Actually, NBER doesn’t officially use the word “recession” as such, but dates the turning points of business cycles, Malpezzi says. Once they date a “peak,” we’re in a downturn, or a contraction, and once they date a “trough” we’re in a recovery, or an expansion.

Since 1900, we’ve had 22 peaks and therefore 22 contractions. In common parlance, two of those contractions (and an intervening expansion!) ran from August 1929 to June 1938, and it’s this period that we refer to as the “Great Depression.” We call the other contractions “recessions.”

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the benchmark measure of our economy’s output. “It’s commonly said that a recession is a period of two consecutive quarters of decline in GDP,” Malpezzi says. “But actually, NBER looks at a range of economic indicators, including trade, industrial output and so on, but paying particular attention to GDP and employment.”

In fact, back in December 11, 2008, NBER officially “called” a peak, and therefore a recession, in December 2007. GDP data had not yet shown declines, but its growth was weak, and employment had reached a peak.

There is no official arbiter, or definition, of “depression,” Malpezzi says. But simply put, a depression is a really deep and long recession. The 1929 to 1938 Great Depression saw a decline in real GDP of roughly 30 percent from peak to trough, and an unemployment rate of around 25 percent, much greater than any loss since that time. While economists still debate the causes of the Depression, there is a consensus that its length was related to policy failures by the government and especially the Federal Reserve.