Unemployment Is All Over The Map

The unemployment rate in America hit 3.7% in September 2018, the lowest since 1969.  The economy is strong. 

Sure, it’s easy to cherry pick articles that claim it’s meaningless since so many people are “out of the labor force”, but even those articles acknowledge the economy is very strong.  If you can’t find a job these days you might not be looking hard enough.  

Here’s a graph of the unemployment rate since 1969:

If you’re a regular reader, you know I love maps and seeing things in geographic context.  Putting data on a map usually reveals things you’d never see if viewed only in a spreadsheet.  And putting things on a map and animating them through time reveals even more. 

That said, I was delighted when I stumbled upon this very cool data animation of unemployment in America over time.  I didn’t really stumble upon it, I have a gazillion map related RSS feeds that I consume on a regular basis.  I know, dork… 

Anyway, enjoy:

One very cool thing to see is how the North Dakota Oil Boom clearly shows up.  A major oil field was discovered there in 2006, and things started ramping up by 2008.  Jobs flowed in rapidly.

And then, well the screen turns black.  Watch a small circle of white start in far Northwest North Dakota in 2007 as the unemployment rate starts to sink, only to get squashed by the recession in 2008. 

But then in 2010 the white blob of low unemployment grows extremely fast as jobs come roaring back.  For a while North Dakota had the lowest unemployment rate in the United States, mostly due to the oil boom.  It lasted well into 2015 but has declined due to oil prices. 

Another cool observation is how the grain belt holds up during the recession of 2008-2009.  Here’s a screen shot of the darkest the map appears to get, in 2009.

Notice the vertical strip I circled in red of relatively low unemployment, even as the rest of the country was suffering.  The North Dakota oil workers are in this circle, but most of it is likely agriculture jobs. 

Those two areas in South Dakota that are still dark in the map above?  Those are both Indian Reservations.  Sadly many of these reservations are still very economically depressed. 

Also notice in the 2009 map that California’s unemployment rate was over 10% almost everywhere, as well as Michigan. 

So it’s very interesting when you have a large swath of the Midwest that still had a very low unemployment rate of generally under 4%, while two states that had a combined population of 47 million people were mostly over 10%. 

Could this pattern hold up when we have the next big recession?  I don’t have the answer to that, but the reason I dork out on things like this is to learn. 

Heck, if I want to pursue geographic arbitrage one day it would be good to know if the grain belt always has low unemployment during bad recessions.  I used to drive a forklift, I’m sure I can learn to drive a tractor.

Your Turn Readers – See if you can find any other patterns.  I’d love to hear some insight about any of the visible patterns from the collective knowledge base out there.