Another Way To Visualize Unemployment

By Chris Wilson

Sept. 29, 2010

Slate's job map, which we've been publishing since April 2009, has visualized unemployment in terms of raw jobs gained or lost in every county compared with the same month in the previous year. These numbers come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Local Area Unemployment data, which estimates the number of employed and unemployed people in every county every month.

This approach has its advantages and disadvantages. The circles that represent lost or gained jobs over the previous year represent the net change in employed people compared with 12 months ago and aren't corrected for the population of the county, so you naturally see bigger losses in populous counties like Los Angeles. This visualizes the scope and sheer magnitude of the crisis, but it doesn't give the viewer a sense for whether Los Angeles has had higher per capita losses or gains versus any other county.

This map examines the regions most affected by the recession independent of population by showing the unemployment rate, not total jobs. These figures are directly calculated by the BLS every month, so you don't have to trust our math.

It's important to note that these numbers are not the same ones used to calculate the national unemployment rate, which has hovered around 10 percent in the last year. To get that number, the BLS conducts a monthly survey of about 60,000 households a month. This method is probably the most direct way to gauge unemployment, but arguably undercounts the unemployed based on how it defines an unemployed person seeking work.

A survey method would be highly impractical for county-by-county data without huge margins of error, so to get these numbers the BLS uses data like unemployment insurance claims and the number of people entering or reentering the work force. (Read about the methodology here.) These are the same figures used to report unemployment by metropolitan area.

The color scheme here is simple: Blue is good, red is bad, yellow in between. Orange and red dots are unemployment rates of more than 10 percent, a psychologically important watermark for the national figure. Many regions, sad to say, far exceed this figure.