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Unemployment Breakdown
The NYTimes has a nice interactive graphic on unemployment rates and changes over time by demographic characteristic. I am in the category--white men ages 25-44 with a college degree-- with almost the very lowest unemployment rate (3.9%). Just to compare, as pointed out in the comments, black males 15-24 without a high school degree have an unemployment rate of 48.5%. Check it out.
Hat tip to FlowingData.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on November 9, 2009 at 10:25 AM in Data Source | Permalink
Comments
No you're not--white women ages 25-44 with a college degree have a rate of 3.6%.
Posted by: Thorfinn at Nov 9, 2009 10:38:35 AM
Its interesting that if you look at men and women all ages, unemployment close to doubles with each change in education level- 4.5% for college grads, 9.1% for high school grads, 17.5% for non-high school grads.
Posted by: Scondren at Nov 9, 2009 10:39:50 AM
Whoops, didn't see the "almost".
Posted by: Thorfinn at Nov 9, 2009 10:49:07 AM
And the graduate degrees do nothing...
Posted by: Nylund at Nov 9, 2009 11:08:01 AM
I bet that graduate degrees become a relative liability in a downturn. During a recession, you probably want a generalist degree to show you are better than your competitors, but over-specialization may be a lead anchor unless you luck into the recalculation industry winners which are, to Paul Krugman's chagrin, smaller than the previous and future bubble industries. That sounds like a dissertation topic to me.
Posted by: Andrew at Nov 9, 2009 11:29:16 AM
For all the discussion about how there might not be a good return to a college education (set grad degrees aside), this makes a good point. Having a college degree also reduces the probability of unemployment.
Posted by: Mo at Nov 9, 2009 11:33:18 AM
Here's a more detailed look at the job scene for those Age 16-19.
Posted by: Ironman at Nov 9, 2009 11:46:54 AM
the thing is, though, unemployment numbers DO NOT count very well self-employed people. MBA 1099 biz consults, french tutors etc. All this data says is that college educated people WORKING FOR SOMEONE ELSE aren't harmed.
Posted by: farmer at Nov 9, 2009 11:58:20 AM
How is the minimum wage labor cohort doing with gov. minimum wage price controls going up stiffly in the teeth of a depression?
Posted by: Greg Ransom at Nov 9, 2009 12:55:39 PM
And since no one else has mentioned it yet, almost half black, male, 15-24, high school dropouts are unemployed.
Posted by: D. Watson at Nov 9, 2009 1:05:05 PM
Black males age 15-24 without a high school degree: 48.5%.
Scary. I'm surprised we don't see riots like in France. Or maybe we do, just spread out over every day, so we don't notice the despair and violence.
Posted by: Mr. Econotarian at Nov 9, 2009 1:10:07 PM
What I don't understand is the disparity between 25-44 year old, college educated, white(3.9), black(8.3) and hispanic(4.3) men. Do black men choose careers so different than white and hispanic men that they experience an unemployment rate that is approximately double?
Posted by: Dave at Nov 9, 2009 1:39:45 PM
Still, you have to take into account all of the progress we've made and how far we've come as a nation.
Posted by: josh at Nov 9, 2009 1:42:07 PM
Black males age 15-24 without a high school degree: 48.5%.
I wonder what the percentage would be for say ages 22 to 24. Not sure what "unemployed at 15 or 18" even means...
Posted by: sk at Nov 9, 2009 2:13:43 PM
I was rather struck by the decision to meld Asian, American Indian, and mixed race together in the 'Other' category. Somehow, I do not expect the statistics for those three groups to be at all similar.
Posted by: Neil S at Nov 9, 2009 2:37:57 PM
The unemployment rate for male non-high school 15-44 black is two to two and a half times that of a male non-high school 15-44 hispanic: all the gardeners, most window washers, grocery store shelf stockers, janitors, car-wash employees, etc. are hispanic men, at least in southern California, where I live.
Posted by: Vasantha at Nov 9, 2009 3:28:01 PM
Anyone else notice the decent-size uptick in unemployment among Black males age 15-24 without a high school degree after the newest minimum wage hike went into effect in July?
WWWWS?
(What would Walter Williams say?)
Posted by: Josh at Nov 9, 2009 3:30:10 PM
What impact do those steep tax cuts passed in the past decade have on the unemployment rates for those different groups? With Federal taxes well under the over 20% of GDP of a decade ago, at less than 15% of GDP, 5% of GDP is supposed to be more wisely spent by the private sector than government. Do the varying unemployment rates indicate the private sector views many categories of workers to be less deserving of employment?
Further, what does it mean that the only sectors that show increased employment are either government jobs or jobs where government does half the spending, e.g., health care?
Maybe this means the people paying less in taxes have less need to work as hard in business to reach the level of wealth they desire so they go on vacation or retire instead of innovating and creating new businesses??
As unemployment is a state of mind, did Alex's peers get really rich in the past decade, and today have decided to go sailing, having made a fortune flipping real estate or pumping and dumping stock, and cashing out wealthy?
Posted by: mulp at Nov 9, 2009 4:19:03 PM
"What I don't understand is the disparity between 25-44 year old, college educated, white(3.9), black(8.3) and hispanic(4.3) men. Do black men choose careers so different than white and hispanic men that they experience an unemployment rate that is approximately double?"
The Class Rank by Race and Economic Class chart here might help explain this:
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2009/11/race-class-.html
50.5% of blanks rank in the fifth quintile, compared to 32.8% of Hispanics, 16.9% of Asians, and 15.8% of whites. Only 4.8% of blacks are in the top quintile.
Posted by: Jm at Nov 9, 2009 4:48:26 PM
I'd suggest that everyone go and play with this graphic.
As soon as I saw this on Friday, I went and showed my undergrad and discussed it with him.
Posted by: Mark at Nov 9, 2009 5:02:00 PM
Employers are more likely to run criminal background and credit checks on applicants than they were 10 or 20 years ago. The industry has evolved and competition has led to reduced screening costs. The impact on African-Americans must be significant.
Young black men are overrepresented among the criminal population. As Devah Pager explained in Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration:
"Over the course of a lifetime, nearly one in three young black men--and well over half of young black high school dropouts--will spend some time in prison."
African-Americans have more credit problems. A 2007 study by the Department of Education revealed that over the first decade after leaving college, African Americans had an:
"overall default rate that was over five times higher than white students and over nine times higher than Asian students."
Data on subprime mortgage defaults from the Boston Federal Reserve showed that African Americans experienced default rates more than twice as high as whites. In addition, the African American population was proportionately more likely to be given subprime loans.
Given the criminal and credit history of African-American males, it's not surprising that young black men, as a group, experience a sharply higher unemployment rate.
Posted by: John Dewey at Nov 9, 2009 5:16:21 PM
@ Josh: Compare that to unemployment for black women in that age group without HS degree saw unemployment that same month--it went down. Anyone have a theory why?
Posted by: libert at Nov 9, 2009 5:24:45 PM
What this tells you is that we need to get going on job training or high school completion programs for certain parts of the labor force. Lest you only look at educational attainment, job acquisition is also part of a social process. If someone you know is employed, they may give you information on an employment opportunity; if all the persons you know are unempoloyed or underemployed, your network, so to speak, has less value. And, lest you think such a network is not valuable for the less than high school crowd, or the low skills crowd, you just have to look at your own experience: do you know persons who work in state or local government, or in your school, who are related to each other, and probably got the job because they were tipped off about it? If you do a social network analysis of public sector jobs, you would probably find firemen related to firemen, policemen related to other policement, etc. The same also goes for manufacturing jobs as well.
So, now imagine a teenager without a dad, high school drop out. What is his social network for finding employment? Now, if you are in academia, what is the social network you rely on from your advisor?
Social network and employment network analyses for the poor are worthy of study and repair.
Posted by: Bill at Nov 9, 2009 6:11:50 PM
Thanks, ironman, for the data about teenage employment.
Posted by: John Dewey at Nov 9, 2009 6:12:47 PM
@libert: My guess is that a lot of it has to do with the criminal background problems mentioned above. Bruce Western has a new paper in the AJS that shows black men without records are less likely to get hired than a similar white man with a criminal record in low-wage urban labor markets. Western doesn't mention it, but I think a lot of it has to do with the minimum wage allowing employers to indulge in their "taste for discrimination."
I don't forgot that most of the stereotypes of have of blacks refer only to black MEN. Black women have their own stereotypes, but I think they have less to do with work or violence issues.
Posted by: Josh at Nov 9, 2009 6:34:14 PM
