Economic recovery test -- the pencil sharpener

I've recently proposed the toaster test as a measure of economic recovery. We'll know the economy is healthy when it's again to buy a toaster that works well for ten years.

Personally I like the toaster test, but it takes a lot of toast to show that the toaster works. Not everyone likes toast as much as I do. Fortunately there's a cheaper alternative, one that I mentioned in a rant last year...

... This morning our last modern pencil sharpener broke. We have only one that works now. It's twelve years old, I remember coming across it in the campus bookstore ... It was made in Germany. We're going to mention it in our will, it may be worth a fortune thirty years from now...

... How to explain this emergent conspiracy of globalized incompetence and occult inflation? Clearly the answer is related to Krugman and Hilton [1] and the reelection of George Bush... Consumers are ... consistently making very poor choices, and the market is responding to the frailty of the consumer...

When we buy pencil sharpeners now they look like this:



When we can buy pencil sharpeners that work as well as this one ...



the economy will be on the mend.