Whether it’s accurate or not, news of financial instability around the world has sparked the conversation for many.

Are we headed for another depression?

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll taken recently found that more than half of American believe another economic depression is likely.

Most economists don’t take quite as dire of a perspective.

“On a 1-10 scale, the Great Depression was a 10 and we are now around a 3 or a 4,” Dr. Ali Malekzadeh, dean of the college of business at Xavier University told WLWT-TV in Cincinnati.

Malekzadeh and other economists point out that while many younger Americans have not seen such difficult financial periods in their lifetime, the numbers just don’t spell disaster as they did in the 1930s.

Consider:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average Dropped 40 percent in two months at the beginning of the Depression. Currently, the Dow has only dropped about 20 percent over the last year.

Unemployment during the Depression reached 25 percent. Now, the jobless rate is around 7 percent.

The gross domestic product plunged 13 percent in 1932. Even in worst-case scenarios, several economists told CNNMoney.com that they don’t see the GDP dropping more than 4 percent over the next year.

That’s not to downplay the current economic situation, but rather to suggest the U.S. is merely in a recession and not yet close to a depression.

A depression is defined officially only as “prolonged” recession. The U.S. has seen 10 recessions since World War II.

There are mixed opinions on what actually triggered the Great Depression. Many believe it was the stock market crash in 1932. However, the Economist.com reports that the Federal Reserve began getting signals of a serious downturn years before.

“As early as 1928 the Federal Reserve, worried about financial speculation and inflated stock price, began raising interest rates. In the spring of 1929, industrial production started to slow; the recession started in the summer, well before the stock market lost half of its value between the end of October and mid-November,” according to the site’s economic research tool.

One factor that may play to the favor of current times is that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spent most of his career studying the Great Depression as an economics professor at Princeton.

“It’s hard to imagine anyone who is more qualified to try to minimize the damage from the current crisis,” wrote David Leonhardt, of the New York Times.

And if the opinion of economists and the qualifications of the chair of the Federal Reserve aren’t enough to convince Americans that a depression is not imminent, perhaps they should consider the words of those who actually lived through it.

Joe Ryan told WLWT-TV that while things are tight, there nothing like the Great Depression, which he lived through.

“I see all these things like cars and concerts and frills of today,” Ryan said. “We just didn’t have that.”