Judging from corporate profits, we should be enjoying a powerful economic recovery. During the recession, profits dropped by about a third, apparently the worst decline since World War II. But every day brings reports of gains. In the second quarter, IBM’s profits rose 9.1 percent from a year earlier. Government statistics through the first quarter (the latest) show that profits have recovered 87 percent of what they lost in the recession. When second-quarter results are tabulated, profits may exceed their previous peak.

The rebound in profits ought to be a good omen. It frees companies to be more aggressive. They’re sitting on huge cash reserves: a record $838 billion for industrial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (companies like Apple, Boeing, and Caterpillar) at the end of March, up 26 percent from a year earlier. “They have the wherewithal to do whatever they want—hire, make new investments, raise dividends, do mergers and acquisitions,” says S&P’s Howard Silver-blatt. Historically, higher profits lead to higher employment, says Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. Except for startups, loss-making companies don’t generate new jobs.

So far, history be damned. The contrast between revived profits and stunted job growth is stunning. From late 2007 to late 2009, payroll employment dropped nearly 8.4 million. Since then, the economy has recovered a scant 11 percent of those lost jobs. Companies are doing much better than workers; that’s a defining characteristic of today’s economy.

In a new paper, Gordon dates the economy’s changed behavior to the 1980s. Until then, companies tended to protect career workers. Since then, “jobless recoveries” have become standard. After the 1990–91 recession, consistent employment growth did not resume for about a year; the lag was nearly two years after the 2001 recession. (The National Bureau of Economic Research, an economists’ group, determines the end of recessions, usually when economic output begins expanding. Job growth does not automatically coincide with output expansion. The difference reflects productivity gains—greater efficiency, or more output per worker.)

In hindsight, the massive job cuts of 2008 and 2009 should not have been surprising. “With the collapse of the financial system,” says economist Lynn Reaser of Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, “companies had to conserve cash desperately, [because] they couldn’t rely on outside financing.” So they savagely axed jobs, inventories, and new investment projects (computers, machinery, factories). From the fourth quarter of 2008 through the second quarter of 2009, business investment dropped at annual rates of 24 percent, 50 percent, and 24 percent. Nothing like that had occurred since at least the 1940s, Gordon notes.

But it’s unclear whether corporate elites were so traumatized by the crisis that they’ve adopted a bunker mentality. That, as much as uncertainty over Obama’s policies, is fearsome. If labor is cowed and capital is overcautious, the recovery must suffer.

Robert Samuelson is also the author of The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence and Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong.