Economics as a social science deals with models and formulas in assessing the financial health of a community, not people. In economics, 16 million unemployed is a number. In communities across the nation, 16 million individuals and their families have a different view of the state of the economy. It’s personal. Newspapers and broadcasters periodically will tell the personal stories to illustrate the effects of the economic slide that began in late 2007. But personal stories are not economics. The specialists will analyze numbers to see that there is an economic recovery. Men and women who don’t have jobs, have had wages cut, have dropped out of the community — they don’t see a recovery. For the individual, it is meaningless that businesses and industries that shed jobs, slashed benefits and cut pay are contributing to economic recovery by increasing productivity. To economists, one signal of economic recovery is an increase in productivity.