Unemployment Update

Back in March, I posted some maps about unemployment in the US. While for the most part it looked good, several states showed a worrying "double-dip" trend. It appears that these concerns were unfounded as March and April turned out to be very good months for employment figures.


Now 37 states are showing improvement, while only 4 show unemployment getting worse. While there are 3 states double-dipping, they are totally different from the ones that appeared to double-dip earlier indicating that it's probably just a temporary set back.

I decided to do another type of map for this update. I was curious to see how much better states have gotten since the peak in unemployment to see if some are doing better than others. However, to give it more context, I had to see how bad they got in the first place. So for each state I compared their lowest unemployment rate prior to the recession to their highest unemployment during the recession.


The scale is done by multiples, so Florida, Idaho, and Nevada had an unemployment more than 3.5 times higher than prior to the recession while Alaska's unemployment increased by less than 1.5 times or 50%. Florida saw the most dramatic increase, going from 3.3% unemployment in 2006 to 12% in 2010.

Since then though, conditions have improved in every state but Louisiana, so comparing their pre-recession best to their current, the map looks like this:


So none of the states are doing better than they were prior to the recession, but Alaska, New Hampshire, and North Dakota are getting closer. Nevada and Illinois have shown a lot of improvement, having changed two ranks.