  The American economy can be thought of as a highly connected random network
in terms of both its technological and informational connections. The
cumulative size of economic recessions, the fall in output from peak to trough,
is analysed for the US economy 1900-2002. A least squares fit of an exponential
relationship between size and the rank of size gives a good description of most
of the data. But the observation for the Great Depression of the 1930s stands
out as a very distinct outlier. In other words, we observe a bimodal
relationship of the type predicted by theory.
