Is the Economy C-Shaped or K-Shaped? The Answer Depends on What You Look At

In the aftermath of a global disruption, economists find themselves arguing not merely about numbers, but about which numbers deserve to be seen. The K-shaped and C-shaped recovery debate — one describing widening inequality, the other a gradual reconvergence — reveals something older than any recession: that the stories we tell about shared hardship are always, in part, choices. What a society decides to measure reflects what it has already decided to value, and in that gap between letters lives the real policy argument of our time.