The Times has an interactive graphic up that breaks out the unemployment numbers for different groups of people. It turns out that only 3.9% of college-educated white men between the ages of 25 and 44 are unemployed. Compare that to nearly 50% for young black men who haven’t graduated from high school (I think that’s the group with the highest rate). Nothing here is especially surprising, and I wish The Times had included more variables, but it’s fascinating nevertheless.
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10 comments
November 6, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Hortense
Shorter numbers –
The present: kinda sucky.
November 7, 2009 at 6:57 am
Jason B.
Well played, sir.
November 7, 2009 at 6:57 am
Jason B.
Er . . . or ma’am. As the case may be.
November 7, 2009 at 3:49 pm
ucblockhead
Interesting that the rate for women is lower across the board. The rate for college educated white women is 3.6%.
November 7, 2009 at 4:39 pm
jazzbumpa
Maybe this is why white people vote Republican – serious recession, possible depression and they are mostly unaffected. If only white people voted, McCain would be in the white house.
http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national-exit-polls.html
Scary.
JzB
November 8, 2009 at 1:21 am
dave
Is the rate for women skewed somehow – either by more being in crummy service jobs that survive recession better, or by a ‘dark figure’ of ‘homemakers’?
November 8, 2009 at 11:36 am
stevenattewell
Dave – it’s the sector issue. Since the beginning of the recession, manufacturing lost 2.1 million jobs and construction lost 1.6 million jobs, and those industries tend to be disproportionately male.
By contrast, health care has actually added 600k jobs, and that industry tends to be disproportionately female.
You can find more fine-grained data here – http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm.
November 8, 2009 at 8:25 pm
rja
Isn’t the conventional wisdom that wars add jobs? Especially blue collar ones?
November 9, 2009 at 12:41 am
stevenattewell
RJA –
That’s a somewhat outdated conventional wisdom, based on the days when the U.S fought with a mass production army. Nowadays, we fight with fewer boots on the ground (and we don’t draft), we use a relatively few extremely high-tech weapons constructed by a handful of firms, and we tend to buy ahead of time. When you combine that with the increasing productivity of manufacturing, especially driven by automation, wars are no longer job-producing factories.
November 10, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Erik Lund
Well, the world hasn’t fought a superpowers war in a long time. That was the take going into WWI, and see where that got us.
It might turn out that momdern mass mobilisation would involve a great deal of digging, wrenching and coding (also, possibly lathing) and employ a buncha people.
I know! Let’s try it and see!
(Also, can we fight an enemy that uses a million Grace Park clones? There really was no downside to that on TV.)