Occam's razor is a principle put forth by 14th-century English logician, theologian and Franciscan friar William of Ockham that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

Likewise when terms like recession, depression and recovery are explained with esoteric economic terms and convoluted mathematical equations, it is highly unlikely that anyone will come away with a clear understanding of what is what.

So probability distributions, ratio statistics, and the expected value of the deviance are completely unnecessary to clearly understand the difference between recession and depression and when a recovery makes both moot.

The answer, revealed below, is quite simple: