The Economist finds that you could have accurately gauged the last two recessions by counting the number of times the word “recession” appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times. Currently, the magazine says this R-word index is soaring and “sounding alarms,” but it’s still at only half the level it reached in 1991 and 2001.

Just for fun, I constructed a Post-Dispatch R-word index, from 1990 up to today’s alarm-sounding story. The result: The index certainly wasn’t at an elevated level last year. If you annualize the number of mentions in the first 16 days of 2008, our R-word-consciousness is rising, but still far below the levels reached in recent recessions. The chart peaks at 2,176 stories mentioning recession in 1991 and 1,066 in 2002, then falls to 297 in 2006 and 343 in 2007. Our archive counts 26 stories* in the first 16 days of 2008, which works out to 595 at an annual rate. 

*The original version of this post contained an incorrect number.