But a conventional boundary, obeyed long enough, can be easily mistaken for an actual thing in the world. Imagine if we talked about the state of the economy this way! Economists have a formal definition of a “recession,” which depends on arbitrary thresholds just as “statistical significance” does. One doesn’t say, “I don’t care about the unemployment rate, or housing starts, or the aggregate burden of student loans, or the federal deficit; if it’s not a recession, we’re not going to talk about it.” One would be nuts to say so.
