They aren't.
You’re just not “intellectually liberal” enough to understand it, that’s all. /sarc.
Also the GDP numbers are susposed to be corrected for inflation but I seriouly doubt that since gov seems to think there is no inflation.
It’s a recovery from from the recession that ended.
During the recession the GDP contracted. After the contraction was over, the GDP began to expand. Hence the term recovery.
The economy can still grow (albeit weakly) and you can still have rising jobless rates or anemic expansion in job totals.
An analogy:
You run a business with 100 workers. Things do well for 7 fat years. Then for whatever reason, sales decline and profits shrink — or you even lose money.
So you lay off 10 percent of your workers. Now you’re turning a profit but sales have yet to improve.
After about six months to 18 months or so with 90 employees, your sales rise and you’re back in the black.
So you have to run longer shifts to meet demand. Rather than hire people, you pay existing workers more overtime, more bonuses, etc. But you still have 90 employees. Or put another way, your unemployment rate, compared to the optimal number of workers you have recently, is 10 percent.
Your business has improved. Your sales are up. Profits are better. But you still have a workforce that remains 10 percent smaller than it was two years ago.
-George