Unemployment Versus Poverty

In the ZIP code demographics thread, DivGuy noticed something that I wondered about, too: "The thing that struck me is the huge gap between the '% unemployed' and the '% below poverty line.'" Thinking about this, a few factors occurred to me over and above the obviously real phenomenon of people who have full-time jobs and still find themselves below the poverty line. Basically, children and retired people aren't counted in the unemployment rate but they can be poor. Indeed, in my neighborhood -- like many other gentrifying neighborhoods around the country -- the children are overwhelmingly concentrated in the more economically downscale households.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/10/unemployment-versus-poverty/46635/