The relative unemployment rates of different states or countries is at best not useful or meaningful and at worst is deceptive. As with a medical study, when you compare some metric between different populations, you have to account for all sorts of variables that could skew the metric in the first place, and in the second place, a good dose of informed and unbiased interpretation may be in order... For instance, the unemployment rate of North Dakota is always pretty damn low... However North Dakota is a place in which you'd probably not want to live regardless of if you were employed or not...
Comparing North Dakota and Oregon, for instance, you see that while the unemployment rate of Oregon is exponentially higher than that of North Dakota, you also see that using the past few years as a baseline, the magnitude of increase for each state is relatively similar, probably even more similar if you compare specific areas of employment... A disproportionate portion of North Dakota's employment comes from areas that are more stable than the norm... areas such as agriculture and the public sector; due to the state's low population density, the ratio of government jobs to private industry jobs is exponentially higher for North Dakota than it is for Oregon.
So all things considered, the average Joe would probably have a tougher time finding a job in North Dakota than in Oregon right now, unless said Joe had connections within the community. If said Joe is a racial minority or is a single woman, his/her chances of finding a job go down considerably, and again, we're talking about a place in which you probably don't want to live or work anyway...
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Topic: herro (Read 8483 times)