The Geography of a Recession | Hacker News Reader

The Geography of a Recession

latoyaegwuekwe.com

35 pointsrafaelc21 comments

Interesting. I notice my county, in southwestern Utah, is at the 2% mark, but my own limited experience suggests that might be a rather conservative estimate. A couple idle speculations as per the study:

1) I know many people who have responded to the recession by attempting to start a business (usually involving a depressingly harebrained business plan). These people often fall victim to Kelly Felix-inspired "make money on the Internet" or other affiliate marketing schemes. I could imagine some of these people, when being surveyed, saying that they did not currently desire a job.

2) Many adults, and recent high-school graduates, who otherwise would not be attending college, are attending college now, thanks to the high availability of student benefits and lack of other options. I don't think the study factored these people (I don't know what criteria one could use to do so anyway), but if it had, I'll bet the resulting unemployment rate would be higher nationwide.

This is a dark pattern.

It plays with color spectrum, pitting red against violet. Not fair. Roy G. Biv?

Now, there are some messed up things like the south -- it appears severe on state borders, thought the black line probably compounds it.

There is something very interesting and valuable here, yet it doesn't feel honest.

EDIT: Reviewing the color spectrum red and violet are next to each other. It felt more severe than it was. Perhaps because violet is compressed into 3 percentage points (purple, violet and dark purple), while there is red, orange, orange-yellow, yellow and cream for the "good-ish", all strong and not neutral.

This is a dark pattern.

That was my thought as well. Plus, Red is used for the 5.0-5.9% range. Red is symbolic of danger, and 5.0-5.9% unemployment isn't great but it's not at the "red alert" level.

I would really like to see this map on a global scale.

The little research I did suggests a 4-6% unemployment rate is healthy, so it seems a neutral color would be preferable.

Per your mention, red is definitely a warning affordance.

Now the places lower than 5%, I want to know why. There's something either insulating them or the coasts are the other extreme.

Also, I want to see this as the US pulls out of it. Will the coasts recover first and trickle back in? Or, will the healthy parts of the US grow outward?

I agree - the data this depicts is indeed very scary, but unfortunately their use of color is a little manipulative and detracts from it.

10%+ should not be total black - there's no reason to make that the extreme, especially when you consider that the real rate of employment could be around 18-19%, and in the Great Depression it was even worse than that.

I hope you mean 'real rate of UNemployment' ?

Im my opinion (Michigan resident), the best part about this map is that it illustrates that Michigan was already in a recession well before the rest of the country was.

And Alabama plus the border or Arkansaw, whats up with that!? California and the Northwest didn't really surprise me since there's a lot of people and not being in tech makes things hard out there.

Unproductive labor (poor education, lack of human capital), few natural resources, zany state economic policies. These are my guesses.

Not a recession, a depression.

I would like to see these numbers for the percent jobless, which will provide a much better indicator of the depth of the problem.

What inferences can be made from this? Many of the states that seem to be holding out have low populations so the real picture may be far more bleak than it appears... see a population density corrected map here: http://www.pnas.org/content/101/20/7499/F1.expansion.html

I'm not trying to offend with this comment, but I surely will regardless. Those states that had those low numbers tend to be the ones where people on the whole would not choose to live unless they had a specific reason to do so. A job, for instance.

It would be interesting to see this with migration rate, too.

Quite a fascinating graphic. If it shows anything, it's that this recession is deep and wide, and far from over.

Why on earth would a recession be geographic, in the information age? Could it be that the information age is a myth?

Because not all jobs are information-related? There's still an awful lot of brick and mortar out there, and plenty of regional retail shops.

...so the Information Age is a myth. Most folks are NOT participating in the Internet Revolution, as indicated by the chart's geographic locality of employment.

hurrah for nebraska!

Small population with a higher-than-average percentage employed by government.

Those same could be said for Alaska as well, yet it has higher unemployment. I wonder what the other factors are - I suspect it has to do with industry to some extent - farming vs. natural resources extraction.

Omaha is a pretty respectable business nexus. I can't think of an Alaskan city with a similar situation.

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