Apr

4

Unemployment Map of U.S-2007 TO 2010

Scary and Real!

Please review this Unemployment map of the United States. This is hard to believe, but TRUE! I had to review this map a couple of times to grasp the enormity of it. Watch the map automatically update from 2007 to 2010… WOW!

Nigel Davies comments:

The scary part may be the symbolic use of colors. Having black (death, nothingness, annihilation) for anything from 10-100% seems almost deliberately misleading and the map looks like a rotting piece of meat. There's probably a similar effect in chess, with players playing White often tending towards optimism whilst Black positions can have a look of doom about them. And you can deliberately magnify the effect by playing cramped looking defenses and even placing the pieces slightly towards the back of the squares. BTW, you get a similar psychological effect with candlesticks, the mind being subtly influenced to see down days (black candles) as being doom-laden whilst white ones appear to offer hope. A good practice may be to use green for down and a neutral gray for up, and maybe do something similar with one's Bollinger bands (black as the upper band, pink or something for the lower one). 

John Lamberg writes:

Many years ago, a wise professor taught me the visual power of choice of scale when preparing a X versus Y graph. 


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2 Comments so far

  1. Gregory Rehmke on April 4, 2010 3:18 pm

    Let's start by asking what the natural rate of unemployment would be, or should be. Economists have generally considered 5% natural. According to Larry Summers, 4% unemployment was considered desirable in the 1960s, though 7% later ("Over time, the unemployment rate drifted upward and, for the most part, has hovered around 7 percent. Lately, it has fallen to 5 percent." (http://econlib.org/library/Enc/Unemployment.html )

    By "natural unemployment" economists mean that it is natural in a dynamic economy for some workers to quit and spend time looking for new jobs, and natural for some industries to shrink, laying off workers as technologies and consumer preferences to change.

    With this background, the Jan. 2007 chart should show most of the country colored red or bright red for "dangerously" low levels of unemployment. Maybe 4% would be the same yellow-orange for caution, but lower levels would be colored red for stop or danger. 5-7% would be green for go and normal, and over 8% or 10% darker. My earlier post argued that higher unemployment today is in part a healthy response to the artificially low unemployment of the earlier bubble economy. Like the hangover that follows drinking too much, high unemployment is an ndicator of needed labor adjustment in process. Though also some of the unemployment is a consequence of regulatory intervention (such as arbitrarily higher minimum wage regulations, higher taxes, and uncertainty about future interventions).

    This 2007-2009 chart animation is the flip side of the misguided employment gains from 2003-2006, when millions switched jobs to build houses that buyers could not afford, and millions more shifted to produce goods and services for the artificially stimulated construction industry. (See: "The House that Uncle Sam Built" for details: http://fee.org/doc/the-house-that-uncle-sam-built/ )

    This is where the damage was done in real estate, where land, labor, and raw materials were purchased, and the finished products soon had less value than the raw materials. Wealth was destroyed and economic coordination disrupted.

    The 2007-2009 chart shows the beginning of the complex clean-up process where workers, resources, and companies began adjusting to real-world conditions, all in the face of new and unprecedented government interventions into financial, insurance, automobile, and health care industries.

  2. Unemployment Map « Masteroftheuniverse’s Weblog on April 4, 2010 4:31 pm

    […] leave a comment » Check out the Unemployment Map that’s over on Daily Speculations and be prepared for a shock, especially if you are a visual type. Still, things were much worse in the late 70’s-early 80’s. I remember when I got out of college, there were no jobs to be had at all. I had to create my own job after college, and I suspect that many people are doing just that. I’m not as bearish as many are, as I realize we need a bad panic/crisis/depression to wash out all the excess and old growth from the system. Excessive government regulation is not allowing the free market forces to cleanse the business cycle and is making things worse. Still, there are ways of profiting from all of this, and it is for the prescient to determine what methods to use to profit. […]

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