Welcome to City-Data.com Forum!
U.S. CitiesCity-Data Forum Index
Go Back   City-Data Forum > U.S. Forums > Georgia > Atlanta
 [Register]
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
View detailed profile (Advanced) or search
site with Google Custom Search

Search Forums  (Advanced)
Reply Start New Thread
 
Old 03-04-2012, 09:44 PM
 
1,885 posts, read 3,387,687 times
Reputation: 1755

Advertisements

Quote:
2011 was a sobering year for Atlanta-watchers. The realization that Atlanta got walloped harder than most of the country in the Great Recession had long sunk in, but the even more disconcerting revelation the year brought us was the lack of recovery in Atlanta, even as the rest of the country and Southeast began to improve. All of that changed on Thursday, with a quiet release from the Georgia Department of Labor. The Georgia DOL and US Bureau of Labor Statistics drastically revised their job growth estimates. How drastically? The preliminary December 2010 through December 2011 jobs data showed that Atlanta lost 600 jobs over the year–frustrating stagnation, to be sure. The January report, however, said that Atlanta gained 68,400 jobs between January 2011 and January 2012. 2011 wasn’t just a year of cautious recovery for Atlanta. It was actually akin to the boom years of 2004 through 2006–arguably better than these years. Indeed, 2011 Atlanta looked a lot like 1990s Atlanta, when the city was the darling of the sunbelt. Over the next several months, the various websites that rank cities in order to get free publicity in local newspapers will start to digest this new data and Atlanta will begin to look much better in comparison to its peer cities. Talk will begin of a renaissance, a turnaround.
The Great Revised Recovery: How 2011 Quietly Became Atlanta’s Best Year in a Decade « The Atlanta Monitor

Courtesy: Testa50
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message

 
Old 03-04-2012, 09:49 PM
 
Location: Savannah, GA
4,582 posts, read 8,939,778 times
Reputation: 2421
Not to be a Debbie downer, but I surely didn't see it...
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 03-04-2012, 10:46 PM
 
207 posts, read 321,142 times
Reputation: 112
I'm not buying it in the least. Atlanta's economy is on life support, and everyone knows it. Try telling those whose home values are in free fall (in fact, the freest fall in the country) that everything was roses in 2011. It's almost laughable.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 03-04-2012, 11:17 PM
 
9,008 posts, read 13,998,458 times
Reputation: 7638
Facts, schmacts. Statistics can be used to prove anything that's even remotely true. Fourteenth per cent of all people know that!

I don't see how a report can be 69,000 jobs off. Surely something is wrong here. Anecdotally, I'm going to guess that the problem is with the revised numbers.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 03-05-2012, 06:26 AM
 
Location: Atlanta - Midtown
749 posts, read 884,206 times
Reputation: 732
I saw this about a week ago on another forum but I'm a little suspect. If this were true, it would be a very big deal and I would expect it to be on all local news outlets.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 03-05-2012, 07:09 AM
 
Location: Kirkwood
23,726 posts, read 24,762,829 times
Reputation: 5702
Home values were inflated during the bubble years. The market is correcting itself and home prices will eventually recover. I have personally seen the recovery. My company has been hiring like crazy and complains that there aren't enough qualified people, same with my wife's company. For too long Atlanta depended on construction jobs and related fields. Those days are gone.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 03-05-2012, 08:16 AM
 
3,697 posts, read 5,954,717 times
Reputation: 2990
I'll break the hiatus in order to respond to some of these comments.

First of all, the 68,400 jobs number is not my analysis or anything. It comes straight from the Georgia Department of Labor and their latest payroll survey data:

http://www.dol.state.ga.us/pdf/pr/nonag_atlanta.pdf

Perhaps they screwed up majorly or something, but I doubt it. There are a lot of pretty smart statisticians and economists at the GDOL who understand the importance of this data, and wouldn't be flippant about posting something like this. If you look at the US BLS data, it hasn't been updated yet. This normally occurs within a couple weeks of the GDOL release. They should post the exact same data.

Second, the newspapers did report it, as I link in the post. They just didn't seem to grasp the significance of the release. They focused on the state unemployment rate dropping a couple tenths, but also add that Georgia added ~80,000 jobs last year. All of this comes from the exact same releases I'm looking at.

Georgia’s jobless rate falls to 9.2 percent in January | The Biz Beat

Third, house values continuing to fall is a worrying trend, but the correlation between house price inflation and job growth is far from ironclad. House prices are determined by supply and demand; job growth is one of several factors influencing the demand side.


It's not a very big deal to me if people refuse to believe it for the time being. Assuming the BLS updates with the same data the GDOL issued, which they always have in my experience, every publication that ranks economic performance and so forth will begin to use the same data I'm using. Everyone who doubts it now will eventually have to confront this, as Atlanta suddenly gets shown in a positive light in more and more reports. This process will take probably a year to happen completely, as many of the reports use very old data (some 2011 reports used 2009-2010 job growth, for example). But Atlanta's 3.1% job growth was roughly double the national average over this time period; we will probably rank accordingly high on a lot of lists.

If people want to wait until the BLS released the same data to make it "official" then that's fine. But I'm pretty comfortable with the analysis shown.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 03-05-2012, 09:00 AM
 
3,972 posts, read 12,622,930 times
Reputation: 1470
Most experts aren't predicting unemployment to drop below 8 percent in Atlanta until 2013-2014. Jobs will be created this year but most believe not at a significant rate.

Most corporations/employers have reached the point that they need to hire and temporary employment is up. Temporary employment is an indicator that permanent employment is going to tick up in the near future. The question is when.

Additionally, metro Atlanta needs to have an uptick in high quality/high paying jobs.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 03-05-2012, 09:18 AM
 
262 posts, read 788,107 times
Reputation: 39
Quote:
Originally Posted by testa50 View Post
I'll break the hiatus in order to respond to some of these comments.

First of all, the 68,400 jobs number is not my analysis or anything. It comes straight from the Georgia Department of Labor and their latest payroll survey data:

http://www.dol.state.ga.us/pdf/pr/nonag_atlanta.pdf

Perhaps they screwed up majorly or something, but I doubt it. There are a lot of pretty smart statisticians and economists at the GDOL who understand the importance of this data, and wouldn't be flippant about posting something like this. If you look at the US BLS data, it hasn't been updated yet. This normally occurs within a couple weeks of the GDOL release. They should post the exact same data.

Second, the newspapers did report it, as I link in the post. They just didn't seem to grasp the significance of the release. They focused on the state unemployment rate dropping a couple tenths, but also add that Georgia added ~80,000 jobs last year. All of this comes from the exact same releases I'm looking at.

Georgia’s jobless rate falls to 9.2 percent in January | The Biz Beat

Third, house values continuing to fall is a worrying trend, but the correlation between house price inflation and job growth is far from ironclad. House prices are determined by supply and demand; job growth is one of several factors influencing the demand side.


It's not a very big deal to me if people refuse to believe it for the time being. Assuming the BLS updates with the same data the GDOL issued, which they always have in my experience, every publication that ranks economic performance and so forth will begin to use the same data I'm using. Everyone who doubts it now will eventually have to confront this, as Atlanta suddenly gets shown in a positive light in more and more reports. This process will take probably a year to happen completely, as many of the reports use very old data (some 2011 reports used 2009-2010 job growth, for example). But Atlanta's 3.1% job growth was roughly double the national average over this time period; we will probably rank accordingly high on a lot of lists.

If people want to wait until the BLS released the same data to make it "official" then that's fine. But I'm pretty comfortable with the analysis shown.
Do you have a link to the original -ve number?

Are you sure you are comparing apples to apples. By any chance, is the original -ve number the average for 2011, and +ve number was comparing 12 months apart? (This question is based on your post from a month or so back. I cant find the post now quickly.)

I can see the statistics say Atlanta added jobs, and I am not arguing that. Just whether there was indeed a huge discrepancy.

Congratulations on your website/blog.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 03-05-2012, 09:29 AM
 
3,697 posts, read 5,954,717 times
Reputation: 2990
Quote:
Originally Posted by lastminutemom View Post
Most experts aren't predicting unemployment to drop below 8 percent in Atlanta until 2013-2014. Jobs will be created this year but most believe not at a significant rate.

Most corporations/employers have reached the point that they need to hire and temporary employment is up. Temporary employment is an indicator that permanent employment is going to tick up in the near future. The question is when.

Additionally, metro Atlanta needs to have an uptick in high quality/high paying jobs.
2013-2014 is probably a very reasonable estimate for Atlanta's UE rate going below 8.0%. One thing that impacts UE rates is that the labor force contracts and expands based on the perceived availability of jobs. In the preliminary December 2011 data, the labor force is 30,000 people large than it was in 2010; in other words, more people are working and actively looking for work than they were a year ago.

However, in 2007, our work force peaked at about 70,000 people larger than our current workforce. Many of those people will rejoin the workforce as the economy improves. This is the headwind in the UE rate I refer to in the post. For that reason, the unemployment rate will recover less quickly than the job growth rates in just about all cases.

As I discuss in the article, it seems to be, if anything, a much harder time for low wage job seekers in metro Atlanta. According to preliminary January 2012 data, the Professional & Business Services sector is one of two that is higher than January 2007 levels (Education & Health being the other, which is also a higher wage sector). Construction, Leisure & Hospitality, Retail Jobs, and Manufacturing are the ones that have really taken it on the chin.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.

Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.


Reply
Please update this thread with any new information or opinions. This open thread is still read by thousands of people, so we encourage all additional points of view.

Quick Reply
Message:


Settings
X
Data:
Loading data...
Based on 2000-2020 data
Loading data...

123
Hide US histogram

Over $104,000 in prizes was already given out to active posters on our forum and additional giveaways are planned!

Go Back   City-Data Forum > U.S. Forums > Georgia > Atlanta

All times are GMT -6. The time now is 12:03 AM.

© 2005-2024, Advameg, Inc. · Please obey Forum Rules · Terms of Use and Privacy Policy · Bug Bounty

City-Data.com - Contact Us - Archive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 - Top