NY Times columnist David Leonhardt dives into the unemployment data and begins connecting the dots on some of the socialeconomic trends triggered by the recession.
(With the article is a very cool interactive map of unemployment and change in unemployment.)
Leonhardt points out:
- This recession is hitting the less educated disproportionately hard.
- Unemployment is higher among men than women and hitting Latinos more than any other ethnic group.
- The Depression caused a surge in school enrollment with a significant long-term benefit to the economy. Signs indicate applications are increasing now as well.
Leonhardt’s comments on the long-term shifts in manufacturing and construction jobs were the most surprising to me. You wonder where the future jobs for these folks will come from (energy conservation and renewables, perhaps?):
By the start of this decade, the construction sector employed more men without a college education than the manufacturing sector did, Lawrence Katz, the Harvard labor economist, points out. (As recently as 1980, three times as many such men worked in manufacturing as construction.) The housing boom was like a giant jobs program for many workers who otherwise would have struggled to find decent paying work.
Leave a Reply