Fun with Graphs

Here’s a simple graph in Microsoft Excel illustrating (i) the growing unemployment in New York City, and (ii) how it contrasts with New York State overall. The tentative conclusion is that the employment situation in New York City isn’t getting better, and that it’s actually harder to get a job in the city than the rest of the state. This makes a certain degree of sense, if you assume that the financial industry cutting back on expenditures (payroll, capital, etc) means fired white-collar workers and fired blue-collar workers who were working on projects financed with money that’s no longer around. To compare, note that the unemployment rate a year ago was 5.9% in the city, so we’re now 4.4% above that.

The green line is a simple linear regression line, courtesy of Excel. It’s not, of course, authoritative – but hey, that is a pretty high r squared value!

Needless to say, we would expect unemployment to top out at some point as businesses reach the end of what they can cut, and wages are driven down. Still, a U3 unemployment rate this high isn’t a happy situation. To compare, the nationwide U6 rate is 16.8% – probably a bit higher in New York City these days.

Note: this is in no way a complete or even useful picture of the unemployment situation. It’s just a cute graph. We’d need to delve into quite a bit more to get an idea of the true unemployment situation.