Second, there are a total of 11 states with unemployment rates that have risen in 2011: Wisconsin, Tennessee, South Dakota, North Carolina, New Jersey, Mississippi, Maine, Illinois, Connecticut, Arkansas, and Alabama. Not a single one of these states is in the West. Five are in the South, three are in the Midwest, two are in New England, and one is a Mid-Atlantic state. Seven have Republican governors and four have Democratic governors, so there is no clear political correlation. Four have unemployment rates lower than the national average, six have unemployment rates higher than the national average, and one has the same rate of unemployment as the nation as a whole.
Next, there are a total of seven states with unemployment rates that are currently above ten percent: California, Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, Rhode Island, and South Carolina. Two are in the West, three are in the South, one is a New England state, and one is located in the Midwest. Five have Republican governors, one has a Democratic governor, and one has an Independent governor. However, six of those seven governors just took office earlier this year. Also, five of these states have unemployment rates that have declined since January. Only Mississippi has seen a slight increase (South Carolina's numbers are unchanged).
Lastly, there are a total of seven states with unemployment rates below six percent: Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. Here we finally see something of a geographical/demographic pattern in the data. Five of these states are located in the central region of the country, and the other two are in New England. Also, every one of these states has a population of fewer than four million people, and six of them have a population below two million. Five have Republican governors and two have Democratic governors. Only South Dakota has an unemployment rate that has risen in 2011, but that is only by a tenth of a percent.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Dr Dreadful
I don't think there's a whole heck of a lot any individual governor can do about unemployment given the way most state governments are structured. That's particularly the case here in California with its permanently deadlocked legislature. Arnie and now Jerry have both tried yelling at them and threatening them, but it doesn't seem to do any good. The voters even approved a proposition to stop their pay if they didn't pass a budget, but they just sued.
So you have to look at the particular economic conditions in each state if you want to account for what's going on with the unemployment numbers, because, as the article observed, the colour of the buttocks currently warming the governor's chair doesn't have much bearing.
2 - RJ
You know, as I was researching this article I'd sort of assumed (as my unstated hypothesis) there would be a correlation between an individual state's unemployment rate trends and the political party of its governor. But there really isn't much of a correlation to be found. So the article ended up being rather dry, though hopefully informative.
3 - Glenn Contrarian
RJ -
as I was researching this article I'd sort of assumed (as my unstated hypothesis) there would be a correlation between an individual state's unemployment rate trends and the political party of its governor.
I made the same kind of mistake in this article. I did find strong correlations between the living standards (in many respects) between red and blue states...but as Clavos pointed out, my premise that blue states were inherently better-governed was wrong despite all the strong indications in that direction.
It took a long time for Clavos to beat into my brain that I had committed a logical fallacy - the "causation-correlation" fallacy - and that I was wrong. So I went back to the drawing board and found the REAL reason why life is generally better in blue states (longer life expectancy, lower teenage birth rates, higher percentage of health-insured, lower violent crime rates, and several others).
And you know what the real reason is? It has little to do with liberal or blue-state governance, and everything to do with the level of urbanization of a state. Generally speaking, the more urbanized a state, then the higher the income, the higher the educational level, the lower the violent crime rate, and so on...and the reason why more urbanized states are more likely to be blue states is because the greater the level of urbanization of a state, the more likely they are to elect a liberal government.
Liberal governance does not bring the greater overall prosperity of blue states - but the greater overall prosperity of those states brings the liberal governance. You could say that part of the proof is that in 2008, a professed lesbian won the mayoral race in Fort Worth (or was it Dallas) in that Grand Poobah of red states, Texas.
So I understand how you feel, and it speaks well of you that you owned up to not finding what you expected to find.
4 - Dr Dreadful
RJ, while I commend you for your integrity in not pursuing your original thesis once it became apparent to you that it was wrong, you'd have done better to try to develop another one, as without it this article is, as you confess, somewhat pointless (unless you enjoy playing around with statistics, as some of us do).
Perhaps you'd have done better to focus on a few individual states where something out of the ordinary or expected seems to be happening.
For instance, California's unemployment rate is exceptionally high, which is to be expected given the parlous state of its economy. But it is coming down in spite of the ongoing shambles in Sacramento. Why?
Or you might look at Michigan, whose governor has taken a combative stance against unions, which one might expect would lead to a net job loss, at least in the short term. Yet unemployment in the state has fallen.
Then there are the poor southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, which you'd expect would have high unemployment but whose rates actually seem to be roughly at or below the national average.
Same goes for West Virginia, another poor state but with a plummeting unemployment rate. What's happening there?
And whatever they're doing in New Hampshire, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Vermont and Wyoming needs to be shared with the rest of us, because it's clearly working.
Happy hunting!
5 - RJ
Thanks for your kind words, Glenn.
6 - RJ
Glenn,
And it was Houston.
7 - Dr Dreadful
I wish to issue a self-correction. It's Wisconsin, not Michigan, where the governor is grappling with the unions, and unemployment there has indeed risen slightly. Disregard that particular question.
Carry on.
8 - Purple Pundit
So from the list, you've concluded nothing? A waste of time other than learning your political prejudices have been proven incorrect. Not sure why a website would publish this
9 - zingzing
websites publish all sorts of stuff, pp. a staunch conservative realizing that he's not always right is certainly worth publishing. it's a rare, beautiful beast.
10 - RJ
8:
I probably should have added a conclusion paragraph, but there really weren't any firm conclusions to be drawn from the data. (As the four paragraphs I wrote after the raw data make clear.)
9:
Thank you?
11 - zingzing
it was back-handed, rj, but i stopped it just short and caressed your stubble.
12 - RJ
In fact, I haven't shaved in a while.
Are you stalking me, zingzing? 0_o
13 - handyguy
Interesting figures, but:
States with significant oil industry jobs benefit when oil prices are high [North Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma].
Small or sparsely populated states are hard to compare to big and densely populated states.
And the numbers are probably from too narrow a time frame, just 6-7 months. Figures from 2007 [pre-recession] and 2009 [depth of recession] might reveal some patterns.
We often expect both presidents and governors to do magic with job numbers, when so much is out of their hands. If presidents and governors of either party could wave a wand and cut unemployment in half, they'd do it. Government can make a difference mostly at the margins, or to fill in the gaps [i.e. stimulus] while the economy heals itself. Which it will, eventually.
14 - Cannonshop
#13 unless said stimulus prolongs or extends the damaging practices that caused the crisis in the first place, in which case you're just delaying the correction so that it cuts deeper and more destructively, and slowing any recovery, since resources that should have been present, have been exhausted trying to stave off the inevitable.
For example, Hoover's attempted stimulus action during the Great Depression, the bailouts of failed S&L's in the late eighties, Bush's big bailouts, Obama's stimulus, etc. etc.
oN a state level, California's current woes, Michigan's perennial problems, etc.
The current situation with a U.S. Credit downgrade and what's shaping up to be a double dip recession, shows that you can't borrow your way to prosperity, eventually the debts come due.
15 - troll
RJ - concerning your title...it'll be interesting to see whether or not the changes you note actually indicate trends :/
Handy - you represent the essence of modern liberalism: an abiding faith in progress
general question - what steps can 'an economy' take to correct a malinvestment in labor?
16 - troll
as Cannonshop points out the US chunk of the world economy needs an influx of resources to 'fix itself' - what reason does capital have to run to the US?
17 - handyguy
The US is already the number one safe-haven choice for international investors, other than gold. When the stock market gyrates, US Treasuries do well, as they are currently. In fact, some economists think this is a good time to borrow more, at record-low interest rates. They also think stoking inflation to 4 or 5% temporarily would help. The right will have conniptions, but so what? They are wrong, as always.
Both troll's and Cannon's 'observations' are actually ideological sniping. Just different ideologies.
Cannon's list of 'failed' stimulus measures is not, shall we say, widely accepted among knowledgeable people. The recession was very deep, but didn't go into depression.
It's hard to prove a negative, but smarter people than me or Cannon or troll believe the 2008-10 stimulus measures prevented much worse calamities and were, if anything, too small.
18 - handyguy
PS I am immensely fucking tired of being told, with a condescending tongue cluck, that I am such a typical liberal and our beliefs are so quaint and irrelevant. [Personal attack deleted by Comments Editor]
19 - troll
sniping?
Handy - I'm asking what I think to be legitimate questions for which I have no answers... [Personal attack deleted by Comments Editor]
that said: is investing in the US Government equivalent to investing in the US economy or is there a distinction to be made?
20 - troll
Handy - with all of the editing please take away this -- don't assume that I'm attacking you by pointing out your faith in progress...more I'm adding to the conversation about what is liberalism
21 - Glenn Contrarian
Cannonshop #14 -
If that were true, then America should have had her biggest depression after WWII since our biggest government-funded stimulus was our military and industrial buildup for and during the war - ALL of it funded by the government, which left us even deeper in debt (relatively speaking) than we are now.
No, a proper stimulus does NOT delay the inevitable...unless the stimulus is simply too small as Obama's was, as most economists today agree.
22 - troll
Glenn - the US GDP grew at high single digits rates starting in '33...it would be interesting to figure out how much of this growth can be attributed to government borrowing/spending
23 - roger nowosielski
The only private sector of the US economy that would still merit investment would be high tech and green technology (if Shell Oil, etc., would let it). Other than that, there is no more US economy, in the creative, productive sense, to speak of. Nor is US consumption, as it's all too often claimed, a reliable index of the health of the US economy. Which is to say, we haven't yet exhausted the stockpile of wealth/assets we've accumulated over the years. Joe Biden's pleadings to the Chinese to be investing in America is a telltale, IMO, of how desperate we've become, close enough to be running on empty.
As an aside, if, as some argue, the US economy offers such lucrative prospects for foreign investment, then why, it's natural to ask, don't the US-based firms do it -- especially since the interest rates (for them) are virtually non-existent.
What do the US firms do, though? They invest in China and India and other emerging economic powers of the (no longer) Third World. And from their perspective, you can't really blame them.
24 - Baronius
For what it's worth, it looks like there's a relationship between the states with declining unemployment and the states that experienced the worst of the housing crisis. Nevada, Florida, Michigan, California, Kentucky, and Arizona saw some of the highest foreclosure rates, and they're all showing declining unemployment. If that means that the impact of the housing crisis is finally subsiding, great. On the other hand, it could mean that the residents are giving up on searching for jobs, or moving.
25 - troll
now I'll get ideological:
people feel it safe to invest in US treasuries because they know that the government wields such coercive force as to be able to extract blood from its citizenry