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Dramatic video of how unemployment has spread (updated)
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I am a sucker for geographically-based displays of just about any data. (And this is not just because the world's leading company for "Geographic Information Systems" software, or GIS, is the ESRI firm of Redlands, California, founded and owned by a home-town family friend, Jack Dangermond. More on that another time.)
The DC-based writer Latoya Egwuekwe has put together a particularly effective short video of how unemployment has spread across the country since early 2007. Like any such display, it's imperfect -- for instance, the employment info appears to be county-by-county, which makes some big, lightly-populated areas look more important than some geographically-small cities. Still, it really gets the idea across. YouTube link is here; embedded video below.
UPDATE: A reader points out that the fine print in the chart above says that the data come from a 12-month moving average of each county's unemployment rate. As she points out, "While that's nice, it will make the start of the recession look less bad and one year later look more bad." That is, the onset of unemployment was more sudden than the graphic indicates -- and improvement, when it happens, will also be faster than the moving average shows.
The DC-based writer Latoya Egwuekwe has put together a particularly effective short video of how unemployment has spread across the country since early 2007. Like any such display, it's imperfect -- for instance, the employment info appears to be county-by-county, which makes some big, lightly-populated areas look more important than some geographically-small cities. Still, it really gets the idea across. YouTube link is here; embedded video below.
UPDATE: A reader points out that the fine print in the chart above says that the data come from a 12-month moving average of each county's unemployment rate. As she points out, "While that's nice, it will make the start of the recession look less bad and one year later look more bad." That is, the onset of unemployment was more sudden than the graphic indicates -- and improvement, when it happens, will also be faster than the moving average shows.
