For this posting I decide to look at the differences in the unemployment rate, comparing my home county to the state and national averages. The reason I decided to do this is because the area I am from is a small town rural community and within the county I live the economy is mostly based around factory jobs that don't even require a high school diploma. I am wondering whether or not there was a significant difference in the unemployment rates when comparing the county to the state and the rest of the nation. The following graphs show the data I found on the kids count data center.
From the two graphs I noticed that the average for the nation was significantly lower than the average for my home county of Dickinson and the state of Michigan. I figure this could be due to the fact that most of Michigan has a similar economy to that of my home county and is based mostly around factory jobs. This is especially true in the Detroit area and downstate where most of the economy has been based on the auto industry and jobs within it. But this only explains why my home county and the state have similar unemployment rates, not why there is such a big difference between the two.
The information in the two graphs starts before the financial crisis that happened in 2008 and ends either in 2011 or 2012(for this I used 2011). The information shows that unemployment for both the nation and state increased dramatically in 2008, especially in Michigan, and I wonder why this was the case. Is this due to the fact that most people in Michigan and in my home area work in factory jobs that in this time period were reduced? Or could it be due to a difference in education or both?
The reason that all of this matters is that unemployment is a problem for not just the unemployed but everyone. The social implications of having all kinds of unemployed people can be wide ranging and possibly lead to higher crime rates or an increase in poverty rates. To see whether or not this was true for poverty, I looked up the poverty rates for children in Michigan during the same period as the other two graphs. This information didn't really show what I expected, it showed that poverty rates stayed the same and then began to increase as the unemployment rates got better. This illustrates that there isn't correlation based on factors and things we would generally hypothesize to be related. This was talked about in the text book, You May Ask Yourself, which explains that correlation is fairly tough to prove and isn't always obvious. However there could be some causality here but it isn't obvious and I would like to see more data before I made too many presumptions about the effects of unemployment on society.
The reason that all of this matters is that unemployment is a problem for not just the unemployed but everyone. The social implications of having all kinds of unemployed people can be wide ranging and possibly lead to higher crime rates or an increase in poverty rates. To see whether or not this was true for poverty, I looked up the poverty rates for children in Michigan during the same period as the other two graphs. This information didn't really show what I expected, it showed that poverty rates stayed the same and then began to increase as the unemployment rates got better. This illustrates that there isn't correlation based on factors and things we would generally hypothesize to be related. This was talked about in the text book, You May Ask Yourself, which explains that correlation is fairly tough to prove and isn't always obvious. However there could be some causality here but it isn't obvious and I would like to see more data before I made too many presumptions about the effects of unemployment on society.
No comments:
Post a Comment