You are the type of person who has an exceedingly organized mind, but a somewhat cluttered life. Family and friends get irritated when you explain, for the umpteenth time, the difference between a partial derivative and a total derivative. Today, you are likely to spend a great deal of time wandering around the shopping mall trying to buy either a coffee cup commemorating the 1960 Presidential election or a how-to book on fixing your computer, with illustrations. Be on the lookout for poorly written technical manuals. You should consider shopping at stores or businesses beginning with the letter B, but do not buy any products with a serial number or product code containing the number 462940. Your preferred shopping venue is the Internet. Your special symbol is the exclamation point (!).

As a Purple Smarphin, you are the brightest and most intelligent person you know. And that goes for shopping, too. You know exactly what you want. You know exactly what it costs. You know exactly when and where to buy. But, of course, shopping is only one of the many activities that attracts your intellectual attention. You shop when you need to and buy if have to, but shopping is not the end all of your life.

The total number of people in an economy, society, or country willing and able to exert mental and/or physical efforts in productive activities. The labor force is a more technical term for the labor resource or labor supply. It includes both employed workers and unemployed workers. An official variation of this term is civilian labor force. While labor force may or may not include military personnel, the civilian labor force explicitly excludes the military. Labor and labor resources are the theoretical terms that economists like to banter about. Labor force and civilian labor force are the terms of choice for government policy makers, data-crunchers, and others who need precise labor resource numbers.

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In the discussion of recession we see that one of the problems confronting both pedestrians and the economy is stepping in an occasional pothole. These potholes are usually small and do little damage. Every now and then, however, our economy falls face first into one humdinger of pothole that's big enough to swallow the better part of a marching band. Rather than a mere recessionary pothole, these are best thought of as depressionary canyons. The Great Depression of the 1930s was the most memorable depressionary canyon on record for the good old U. S. of A. The question we need to ponder over the next few pages is: Are there any more depressionary canyons like the 1930s lurking along the economic pavement?
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