The correct term for the current global economy is not recession.  It is depression.  The period we now call the Great Depression was not an unending period of shrinkage of business activity.  There were ups and downs but the trend was deflation.

 

In 1929 a top of the line automobile sold for around $1300; a Chevrolet sold for $650.  By 1940 automobiles were technologically vastly improved, virtually all automobiles had all metal bodies.  The list price on my 1940 Studebaker President was $1275.  Fords sold for about the same price as 10 years earlier.   This despite the debasement and competitive devaluation of the U.S. dollar and international currencies (1930's version of Quantitative Easing).

 

That is a deflationary depression.  Wages and salaries weren't down but they were stagnant.  The cost of goods and services were stagnant as well.  Then, as now, there were pockets of very high unemployment and miserable poverty, as well as areas of comparative prosperity.  The "Okies" of the dust bowl went to California during the Depression because they heard things were good in California, and they knew things were terrible in the dust bowl.

 

Just because the soup lines have been replaced by SNAP cards (the latest euphemism for food stamps, or EBTs) only means they are invisible, not that they are non-existent.