Will this recession pass?

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian of 9 January takes leaf out of the historian's file to assure us that all will be well.

As usual with Jenkins, there are buckets full of common sense slopping around everywhere in his argument. I'm with him in his jibes. I have to say the Bishops got my goat particularly with their hefty shutting of the borrowing the door so long after it would have done any good.

My question though is whether we are seeing something that has a substantial structural element to it. A friend told me that he had been away from Falmouth for the Christmas Holiday and returned to find third of the shops shut. This is an exaggeration, but the high street of smaller towns are beginning to look like mouths after a visit to the dentist. Retail is changing. My own village is awash with courier companies delivering on line purchases. It has been apparent for ages that the high street is made up largely of financial services, opticians, designer clothes and coffee shops. Soon surely it wil just be spectacles and cups of coffee.

But what does or should this mean for the economy? As pointed out elsewhere in Jenkins's article one third of workers are relatively untouched by recession, being on the public payroll; another cohort, those already taking their pensions, are in the clear. Those at risk are those for whom economic growth is a vital link in the chain. Many jobs go on from year to year simply because they need to be done; these surely are pretty safe. It is the jobs that come from someone taking risk to gain advantage that go in recession but even then not all of these.

But in the longer term, are these jobs less likely to appear in the future? I think not. the entrepreneurial instinct is firmly in place and will be bursting through any minute now.
The landscape though will change and this we must accept. Perhaps though the old labourites were right. An economy cannot exist happily on financial service and retail alone. some how, somewhere, someone needs still to make something.