The Truth Is Out There
Some economists are heralding the end of the recession, but I’m not taking out my party hat yet.
Nationally, the unemployment rate stands at 9.4%, but if you add in discouraged workers and involuntary part-time workers, it’s 16.3%—a slight improvement from the 16.5% we saw in June, but still abysmal. And economists are still predicting high unemployment—averaging about 9.8%—throughout 2010.
While the Minnesota unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% in July, we’ve got our own bad news to deal with. The recent job vacancy survey conducted by DEED found that there are now 7.7 unemployed workers for each job vacancy in the state. (This is up from 5.6 unemployed workers per job vacancy six months ago, and if you go back far enough—see left side of graphic below—you can see that in the early part of this decade there were actually more jobs than there were job seekers!)
But the story gets worse (I think I will have to put something fun and silly at the end of this post, to balance out all this bleakness): Six months ago, the median wage (half pay more, half pay less) for open jobs was $11/hour. That has fallen to $10/hour. Yikes! That means that half the people that get jobs in Minnesota will make less than $21,000 a year if they work full time. But the chances are good that they won’t, because 41% of the jobs available are part time.
On a Lighter Note
Did you know there is a part of the brain called Area 37? I had no idea. I learned this in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. (Read my other entry about Proust and the Squid.)
It’s for object recognition.
Area 37. Doesn’t that sound like something you’d find in The X Files or House of Leaves?
Kind of creepy.
