Employment, Unemployment, Myths and Mysteries

There are some 130 jurisdictional regions that represent over half of the nation’s population.  Some of these are big cities (Chicago, Boston…) others are smaller cities like Nashville, TN; dense urbanized counties like Fulton, GA; places with a small town feel but dense populations like Lancaster County, PA.  But they all have populations of 500,000 or above.  The Brookings Institute recently did a report on employment in each of these areas. 

     Seventy-two percent of all working-age Americans (18-64 years old) are employed.  Jurisdictions with high employment are peppered across the country:  Kansas, Minnesota, Washington, Maryland and Nebraska all have communities with 80%+ employment. 

Yet, the employment rate varies from 51% in Detroit to 82% in Johnson County, Kansas.  Each jurisdiction studied suffered from the same economic ailments but they responded to them in different ways and with different levels of success.  Some areas of unemployment are majority black, like Detroit and Baltimore, others are Latino like Hidalgo County, Texas or Kern County, California, while others are white like Lee, Polk and Brevard counties in Florida.  

      It would be easy to guess that Whites (76%) have the highest employment rate, but might be surprising that Latinos (73%) and Asians (72%) all have employment rates clustered close to that number.  In fact, Blacks are not far behind with an employment of not quite (70%).  Unemployment numbers show bigger differences.  White and Asian unemployment is 4%, Latino around 5% while Black unemployment is almost 8%.  Around 20% of all groups—slightly less for Whites and up to 24% for Asians--are not in the labor force at all.  [None of these numbers include children or retirees.]

     Disaggregating data by geography is where interesting differences occur.  First, the highest Black, Latino and Asian employment rates are in the same places as the highest White employment rates.  Prosperity employs all colors.  But the most surprising fact may be that many high Black employment jurisdictions are in suburbs abutting cities of extremely high Black unemployment!  Two of these areas are the suburban counties of Baltimore County, Maryland and Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.  If being Black in Philadelphia or Baltimore creates unemployment, but being Black in its suburbs does not, it is not being Black that causes the problem! There is something else at work.

      The difference lies in three words.  Youth.  Education.  Marriage.  Evidently, if you want to improve employment you need young, smart and disciplined people.  Should this really be a surprise?  Has this not been the case in ages past? 

      The blacks, Latinos and Asians moving to the suburbs are those who want (and have the mental and emotional ability) to escape the desperate poverty and serial failure that welfare, drugs, crime and single parenthood have created in the inner cities.  Welfare—well-intentioned but hardly well-conceived—plays a huge role in this.  Cities like Chicago and San Francisco have wide disparities between black and white employment, but also provide enormous subsidies for not working.  [In Baltimore, a woman applying for all possible assistance, can get more in welfare than she could make as a first-year teacher!] 

      If we want to deal with employment in a rational way we need to look realistically at the people who are and are not working.  If our social institutions are a factor, we must correct those errors which we have created and for which we are paying.  For most people, the constrictions of welfare are enough to move them beyond public dependence, but not for everyone—and that is a problem of character, not race. 

      Be glad you have a job and keep the faith.