Tempting as it is to recall the roasting a previous finance minister received - from the Liberals, I think it was - for speaking of a "technical recession," Mr. Martin is of course correct. The recession death-watch is one of the silliest of all journalistic rituals, exceeded only by the invariably fruitless search for a "knockout blow" in televised political debates.

The technical definition of a recession, two straight quarters of contraction in total output, was not, after all, handed down to us by God. It is entirely arbitrary, and virtually useless as an indicator of economic conditions. At the moment the growth meter slips from plus 0.1 per cent to negative 0.1 per cent, the economy does not turn into a pumpkin. Whether the economy happens to be just above or below the zero- growth line makes no discernible difference in the circumstances of people's lives.

In neither case will output be growing enough to absorb the normal increases in population and productivity; in either case, therefore, per- capita incomes will be falling and unemployment rising. Bad times, in short, are bad times. The only purpose served by sticking the "recession" label on an otherwise imperceptible change in this state of affairs is to give reporters something to do. At that, whether the economy is in a recession often seems less important than whether a politician can be hectored into saying it is.

This would be more defensible if the press were as quick to declare the end of a recession on the same basis. But whereas the last recession was announced about six months in advance of the economy actually slipping below the waterline, the recovery that began in the second quarter of 1991 was delayed for several years in most press accounts by determined attempts to redefine us back into the recession - or depression, as it is called in The Toronto Star.

Speculation on whether we are in a recession would seem especially pointless coming from people who think we are still in the last one. Pointless, but not impossible. Whatever the technical definition, a recession is more usually defined in popular economics as any time the economy is not growing as fast as it should be. And since, by another axiom, the economy should always be growing faster than it is, this yields the entirely useful result that the economy is always in a recession. Q.E.D.

So it was predictable that the news that the economy grew at an annualized rate of just 0.7 per cent in the first quarter, the 16th consecutive quarter of growth, would elicit panicky cries of "recession." Not that the economy actually declined, mind you: but, as a Star editorial noted, it "would have" shrunk had certain things not happened that in fact did. In any case, after two years of better than 4- per-cent real growth per year, the thought that the economy might pause for breath is apparently too much to bear.

While it is evident that growth has slowed since the start of the year in both Canada and the United States, it is not at all clear that this points to a recession. It would be hard to square, for starters, with the 20-per-cent rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the same period. Nor are the usual precursors of a recession - a marked increase in debt, factories straining at capacity, and other indicators of an overheating economy - much in evidence.

The one thing that would be guaranteed to produce such conditions is a hasty easing of monetary policy, the universally prescribed remedy for the recession that is always with us. For just as the economy, however fast it is growing, should always be growing faster, so it is a principle of popular economics that interest rates, wherever they are, should always be lower. (At 8.75 per cent, the prime rate is, according to the Star, "far too high." Oh? Compared to what?)

Whatever influence monetary policy may have over the real economy, it only takes effect with a long and uncertain lag, perhaps as much as 18 months. And so far as looser money is understood by investors to mean higher inflation down the road, it will have no influence but to drive the dollar down and long-term interest rates up. This year's recession, if it comes, will not be cured with next year's inflation.