Every three months the ONS releases an estimate of the change in GDP over the previous quarter, and

the media minutely analyse this one piece of information in isolation and draw all kinds of inferences from it. The single data point is seldom put it in the context of the time series to which it belongs.
2.00 1.50 1.00 0.50 0.00 -0.50 -1.00 -1.50 -2.00 -2.50 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Quarterly percentage chaange Quarterly percentage change

In fact, even though this is publicly available data, it is non-trivial to get hold of it all together, because 99% of the places which discuss the figures do so for 1 or 2 points in isolation. Practically no-one puts it all in one place, which seems to me like an obvious first step in trying to make sense of it. Even on the ONS website it took a fair bit of combing to find it in a single dataset. This strikes me as a bizarre way to analyse the data, like trying to infer what the picture on a jigsaw is by taking the pieces one at a time into another room and minutely examining them. Another point which rarely gets more than a mention is that these values are estimates, with uncertainties. In fact, plotting error bars consistent with the typical error distribution in the estimates for the last 20 years (when compared to later more accurate estimates) shows that the errors are pretty large compared with the size of the effects measured, and in fact for all but one of the last 15 estimates considered individually we can't even be that sure whether they were positive or negative. The size of the error bars also suggests that it is pretty dangerous to make inferences from a single data point.
3.00 2.00 1.00 0.00 -1.00 -2.00 -3.00 -4.00 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

There has also been a lot of discussion about double and triple dip recessions, but I think this classification has very little analytical value. Given the size of the error bars, it is basically impossible to distinguish an apparent dip caused by noise from a genuine effect, so trying to count the number

of dips is a very weakly determined problem and in any case far less significant than the overall trend.
380000 370000 360000 350000 340000 330000 320000 310000 300000 290000 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

This looks to me like a period of growth followed by one well-defined dip, then a period of modest growth (possibly with some flattening at the end), plus some noise. The extremely contrived example below based on a quirk of the way recessions are most commonly defined illustrates another reason why I don't think counting the number of dips is a very valuable measure compared to overall trends.

ONS GDP measure

This is a quadruple dip recession

This isn't a recession at all

On the other hand, terms like double and triple dip recession have very negative connotations and may have significant negative influence on the way people perceive the state of the economy.