It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose your own.

The line contrasts abstract economic labels with lived experience. A “recession” can feel like a distant statistic when hardship happens to someone else, but it becomes a “depression” when unemployment strikes personally. The quip underscores how economic downturns are unevenly distributed and how empathy and policy urgency often depend on proximity to suffering. It also functions rhetorically: by collapsing macroeconomic terminology into everyday consequences, the speaker reframes economic debate around jobs and household security rather than technical indicators. Whether or not Truman coined it, the saying endures because it captures a common psychological truth about how people perceive risk and crisis.