This great visualization by LaToya Egwuekwe shows how deepening unemployment spread across the country from January 2007 to today:
There’s a higher-res (but unembeddable) version available as well.
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Comments (2)
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It is frightening when you see how it was a slow gradual pace until October 2008 then it shoots right up as you see the dark colors encroach on the map and quickly swallow it up whole.
I hope and pray those people & families affected have support from those people all around them.
Dustin
Posted by Dustin on December 10, 2009 at 2:18 AM
Posted on December 10, 2009 at 2:18 AM
Unemployment, both in the U.S. and the world as a whole, marches ever higher because the field of economics doesn't account for the relationship between population density and per capita consumption.
Following the beating the field of economics took over the seeming failure of Malthus' theory, economists adamantly refuse to ever again consider the effects of population growth. If they did, they might come to understand that once an optimum population density is breached, further over-crowding begins to erode per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment.
And these effects of an excessive population density are actually imported when a nation like the U.S. attempts to trade freely with other nations much more densely populated - nations like China, Japan, Germany, Korea and a host of others. The result is an automatic trade deficit and loss of jobs - tantamount to economic suicide.
Using 2006 data, an in-depth analysis reveals that, of our top twenty per capita trade deficits in manufactured goods (the trade deficit divided by the population of the country in question), eighteen are with nations much more densely populated than our own. Even more revealing, if the nations of the world are divided equally around the median population density, the U.S. had a trade surplus in manufactured goods of $17 billion with the half of nations below the median population density. With the half above the median, we had a $480 billion deficit!
If you‘re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, then I invite you to visit either of my web sites at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com or PeteMurphy.wordpress.com where you can read the preface, join in the blog discussion and, of course, buy the book if you like. (It's also available at Amazon.com.)
Pete Murphy
Author, "Five Short Blasts"
Posted by Pete Murphy on December 13, 2009 at 12:50 PM
Posted on December 13, 2009 at 12:50 PM