US – Who are the jobless

Averages don’t tell us anything about how employment opportunities are distributed. We tend to talk about the unemployment rate as if it was a shared reflection on all of us. But that’s a bit silly. After all, no one is 5.8 percent unemployed and 94.2 percent employed. For real people, having a job is an all-or-nothing proposition. Which is why we ought to care more about just who the unemployed are.

Take a look at the figure below, which is from “ Who Are the Unemployed?,” the second installment in my “Working Paper Series” for The Century Foundation. It shows the predicted unemployment rates of a few key demographic groups. (Why predicted? More on that in a minute.)

The dark bars indicate groups who are unemployed at greater than average rates, while the light bars show those who are less likely to be unemployed. It’s quite a bumpy road of highs and lows; another way of saying it is that unemployment is far from equally shared.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at Unemployment Rate Hides Who the Jobless Really Are – US News.