I think those of us who lived through the 90s and 00s have a hard time counterdiscombobulating all the stuff that went down. People who experienced the 60s and 70s probably have similar difficulty.
The worst downturns tend to be at least somewhat sector dependent. There has been at least one aerospace downturn when PhDs were driving cabs in Seattle.
In the dot-com crash, a lot of people in software especially left the industry and many never really got their careers back on track or recovered financially. On the other hand in 2008/9, there was belt tightening in the software industry but overall the impact didn't end up being all that great. Remains to be seen if this period will be the former or latter. Of course, individuals can still be very affected even if the overall impact isn't huge.
Software ate the world. The years since the Dot-Com Bubble burst is like if the interstate highway system was built after the recession of the 1970s. The Factory Belt wouldn’t have become the Rust Belt if that had happened.
