And it’s not as good as it looks. More than all the 0.4 per cent growth in GDP during the June quarter was explained by the 0.7 per cent growth in the population as immigration recovers.

So when you allow for population growth, you find that GDP per person actually fell by 0.3 per cent. The same was true in the previous quarter – hence all the people saying we’re suffering a “per capita recession”.

As my colleague Shane Wright so aptly puts it, the economic pie is still growing but, with more people to share it, the slices are thinner.

It’s possible that continuing population growth will stop GDP from actually contracting, helping conceal from the headline writers how tough so many households are faring.

But the media’s notion that we’re not in recession unless GDP falls for two quarters in a row has always been silly. What makes recessions such terrible things is not what happens to GDP, but what happens to workers’ jobs.

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It’s when unemployment starts shooting up – because workers are being laid off and because young people finishing their education can’t find their first proper job – that you know you’re in recession.

In the month of July, the rate of unemployment ticked up from 3.5 per cent to 3.7 per cent, leaving an extra 35,000 people out of a job. If we see a lot more of that, there will be no doubt we’re in recession.

But why has the economy’s growth become so weak? Because households account for about half the total spending in the economy, and they’ve slashed how much they spend.

Although consumer spending grew by 0.8 per cent in the September quarter of last year, in each of the following two quarters it grew by just 0.3 per cent, and in the June quarter it slowed to a mere 0.1 per cent.

Households’ disposable (after-tax) income rose by 1.1 per during the latest quarter but, after allowing for inflation, it actually fell by 0.2 per cent – by no means the first quarter it’s done so.

What’s more, it fell even though more people were working more hours than ever before. People worked 6.8 per cent more hours than a year earlier.

So why did real disposable income fall? Because consumer prices rose faster than wage rates did. Over the year to June, prices rose by 6 per cent, whereas wage rates rose by 3.6 per cent.

Understandably, people make a big fuss over the way households with big mortgages have been squeezed by the huge rise in interest rates. But they say a lot less about the way those same households plus the far greater number of working households without mortgages have been squeezed a second way: by their wage rates failing to rise in line with prices.​

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This is why I say the nation’s households are paying the price for fixing an inflation problem they didn’t cause. It’s the nation’s businesses that put up their prices by a lot more than they’ve been prepared to raise their wage rates.

Businesses have acted to protect their profits and – in more than a few cases – actually increase their rate of profitability. In the process, they risk maiming the golden geese (aka customers) that lay the golden eggs they so greatly covet.

If you think that’s unfair, you’re right – it is. But that’s the way governments and central banks have long gone about controlling inflation once it’s got away. It was easier for them to justify in the olden days – late last century – when it was often the unions that caused the problem by extracting excessive wage rises.

But those days are long gone. These days, evidence is accumulating that the underlying problem is the increased pricing power so many of our big businesses have acquired as they’ve been allowed to take over their competitors and prevent new businesses from entering their industry.

The name Qantas springs to mind for some reason, but I’m sure I could think of others.

Ross Gittins is the economics editor.

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