Does Low Unemployment = 'Good Economy'? (employment, living in, prices)
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It doesnt necasarily mean a good economy..... A city could be filled with lots of low paying jobs which force people to struggle every day to pay bills and eat. However, those low paying jobs are also keeping the stats looking better for places, but it doesnt mean people are living any better.
Living in Austin I can see your point. Many of the jobs added last quarter (in Austin) were service and hospitality jobs...still, it looks good on paper when most cities are losing even these positions.
I think I tried to use a mix of consumer confidence and unemployment. I would've added in poverty too, but I'm not sure where to get current figures on that by state.
On another matter you're right that having low unemployment before and now likely doesn't mean the place will boom once the recession ends. I'm not sure if I even intended that, but if I did I was mistaken. I think it might mean a particular state is relatively "stable", which can be good or bad depending on one's perspective.
Louisiana isnt exactly known as a job mecca, but it is doing very well with unemployment still. It just means our state has better sustainability in the event of a recession because of the kind of work that is done here.
Low unemployment means more people are working which means that the government is artificially propping the system less which is a useful measurement to gauge the overall health our capitalist economy. However, it is only one unit of measurement, and so you know, economics is a pretty complicated subject that's pretty difficult to reduce to a single statistic.
Low unemployment in this situation simply means that the population growth isn't outpacing the job growth. When you have states like California that are extremely popular(for Americans and Mexicans) they will inevitably experience high population growth even if the job sector isn't necessarily growing. What you end up with is high unemployment once you pass your economic carrying capacity. The same can also happen when a state that was experiencing high job growth slows down and it takes a while for the rest of the nation to get the news and stop migrating there. This issue is compounded with the fact that job growth/cuts typically lag behind the other economic indicators. The DOW could go up, consumer confidence could rise, and we could still get news that more jobs are being cut.
That's a very interesting question. Here in Lincoln, Nebraska we have always had really low unemployment, and that figure really has not gone up much at all during this recession (in fact Nebraska has the 2nd lowest unemployment in the nation right now at 5%, and I think Lincoln is a bit below that as a city). It doesn't mean this is a booming place, or that it will ever be booming- it's just a bit stagnant, the jobs that are here are stable and not going anywhere (does not mean people are poor or struggling by any means), and it will continue that way after the recession ends. So I guess this place is by no means a mecca now and never will be, we are just fortunate that not many of our neighbors (hardly any at all) have lost their jobs during this down time.
A lot of the places that have had low unemployment rates are big energy producing and mining states like Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Louisiana, etc. In fact, ND actually was one of the few states that has a budget surplus. That is almost entirely due to the higher prices of commodities like oil and natural gas that occurred last year. Crop prices were also quite high.
I always assumed people moving to an area would create jobs and spur economic growth.
I can see it's more complicated than that...but I still wonder how a state goes about *creating jobs*?
I guess you need people moving to the area to take those (new) jobs but other than that I'm drawing a blank.
hm...'creating'...'jobs'...
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