Big Pockets of Unemployment Linger
Unemployment is not a national problem. It is a local one. The national rate of joblessness would drop sharply if employment improved even modestly in California, North Carolina, Nevada and Rhode Island, where the rates are still in double digits.…
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There is a consensus that joblessness has improved over the past few months, even in the regions hardest hit by the recession. But when 12.7% of the people in Nevada are unemployed, as was the case in January, and probably close to another 10% are underemployed, the state is closer to a depression than a robust recovery.
Nothing special has been done for Nevada and the other three states on the list of those with the highest unemployment. Nothing will be. The federal government treats unemployment largely as a national problem, the way it does poverty and education. But not all geographic regions are equal, which means that countrywide programs will leave behind certain states, and the residents of their most troubled cities and counties.
It may be that the federal government is not adroit enough to help create jobs by state. Or it may be that one senator who asks for more aid for his or her state will encounter dozens of senators who want the same for theirs. No matter what the reason, the recovery is particularly uneven in the U.S., and that puts a drag on the economy overall.
Douglas A. McIntyre
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
