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According to economist Stephen Fuller, who heads up George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis, the worst part of the current economic storm is behind us.

"The economy is beginning to grow at this point," declared Fuller, during his "Shape of the Recovery" summit Oct. 20 at Northern Virginia Community College in Sterling. "But that doesn't mean everything is all fixed, because we've had a really bad case of the flu for 20 months and we're just able now to get out of bed."

Fuller went on to stress that growth is uneven and is coming "very, very slowly" — and that, in touching bottom, this economic dip has been "longer and deeper than any since the Great Depression."

The downturn, which he dates from the first quarter of 2008, was "generated by nothing we've ever known before ... this is more like a blood disease, because it was financially based and not caused by an inventory problem or an outside shock," like the sudden 1973 OPEC oil price hike.

Fuller's optimism is rooted, he explained, in factors including a recent small increase in the length of the average workweek, now beginning "to inch up again," at just above 30 hours today, compared to a normal level of 37 hours.

Housing trends and consumer confidence are other factors showing promising trends upward, according to Fuller. But he warned that post-World War II, record-high unemployment — 9.8 percent nationally in September and expected to go over 10 percent before the end of the year — is expected to remain high for years to come. He pointed to a loss of about 8 million jobs since the start of the recession, vanished jobs that are not cyclical and which tend to return when economic indicators point upward, but instead are "structural" and persistent even in good times.

"Many jobs have simply been erased," and the fact that they will never return, he said, puts more stress on individuals to upgrade skills in a world of rapidly changing technology. Community colleges, he said, are the educational incubators of these needed new job skills.

Fuller said that the Washington metro area has been insulated to a degree from the economic chill. But overall the Washington area follows national trends, simply with a cushion provided by the large number of government-related jobs which tend to be less susceptible to layoffs. To the extent that area employment has been cut, Fuller pointed out that "we're losing jobs that pay $30,000 per year but adding jobs that pay $80,000 a year."

Compared to metropolitan areas such as Detroit and Los Angeles, the Washington area is much better off, he declared. Basically, the entire nation will eventually benefit from current economic restructuring, which Fuller said is moving to a post-industrial future of "knowledge work and technology," and "this job growth will drive our recovery strongly by 2011."

Benjamin Orr, an analyst with the Brookings Institution's Greater Washington research unit, isn't quite as bullish as Fuller, but sees improvement.

"We would agree with Fuller's basic thrust," Orr said. "We're pretty positive on D.C.'s regional economy as a whole, especially considering the economic situation in the rest of the country." 

But according to Orr, all is not rosy in the regional scenario: "We may have one of the lowest unemployment rates among the top 100 metropolitan areas ... a strong labor market, but housing prices and foreclosures are a problem, so we have a weak housing market."