Detroit’s unemployment rate is probably near 50 percent

The Detroit News’ Mike Wilkinson has an eye-opening story on how unemployment rates generally under-report true joblessness — and specifically how this is happening in Michigan’s largest city.

The story points out that Detroit’s official unemployment rate of 27 percent (as of October) may be dramatically under-counting those without work in the economically-strapped city. The actual unemployment rate, when you factor in those who have given up looking for work or who have gone back to school following fruitless searching for work, could be as high as 45 percent.

Similarly, official joblessness stats don’t include early-retirees — those who want or need to continue to work but have fallen victim to corporate downsizing — or those who work part-time but would really prefer full-time work.

The story quotes Marc Levine, director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who has studied employment patterns in the Midwest. From the story:

Levine said you can get a hint at the depth of the problem by looking at the male jobless rate, which avoids the problem of counting stay-at-home mothers.

For a variety or reasons — access to transportation, job availability and work skills — an estimated 48.5 percent of male Detroiters ages 20 to 64 didn’t have a job in 2008, according to census figures. For Michigan, it’s 26.6 percent; for the United States, 21.7 percent.

In Detroit, many of those are truly unemployed and looking for work, but tens of thousands more are not, Levine said. If they were counted in the unemployment rate, he said it would be far higher — approaching 50 percent.

“I think it’s a dramatic kind of conclusion, but you’re not on soft ground,” Levine said.

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jacobhelms

Legalize and tax drugs.The time is now.

Pete_Murphy

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 my web site at http://PeteMurphy.wordpress.com.
Pete Murphy
Author, "Five Short Blasts"

melpol

Turning areas of Detroit into red light districts will put thousands of the unemployed to work. With police approval jobs will be open for pimps,hookers, and drug dealers. No capital investment will be needed, and the new Detroit will attract fun loving customers from all over the world. Poverty will be gone along with the religious leaders that would rather see high unemployment than sin.

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Detroit’s unemployment rate is probably near 50 percent