Recess This

I was too young to remember the last US recession. My memory serves that it started after Gulf War I and lasted until the day NAFTA took effect. From then until now, not including the 2001-2002 almost-meltdown of Enron and WTC, was the everlasting horizon of jobs just for knowing what a mouse was and clever Superbowl ads (here and here)

According to statistics from the Labor Bureau for US citizens over the age of 25, the following has occurred over the last decade:

The highest rates of unemployment and the lowest wages are shared by those with no high school degree. It is no great surprise that these statistics would be associated those who attained the least education. Many factors associated with low educational attainment - poorly performing schools, low family income - are likely better indicators of future earnings and help us understand that lack of education is certainly not the same thing as lack of intelligence, but the correlation is what it is.

Troubling, too, is that even though unemployment for this segment is around its 1998 level, during the summer of 2003 it was as high as 9.4% and averaged 8.81% from May '03-May '04. Consider then that 13.6% of the United States population doesn't have a diploma. The census estimates the population of the US that was at least 25 years old on July 1, 2006 at 201,504,955 people. Of those folks, according to the labor department 1,945,731 were without jobs.

Even scarier is at the same time, those 25.5 million undereducated Americans that were employed on 7/1/06 were making an average of $12,828 a year. Scarier still - that figure is only ~$300 more (a year!!!) than the numbers in 1998, and now, the kicker: $700 LESS than they were in July of last year!!!

For all other groups - diploma, diploma & some college, college degree - the news is, if only slightly, better. Unemployment for each of these groups has only broken 5% for those with no college. It peaked at 5.7% in the dreaded summer of 2003, hit a valley at 4.1% in '06 and is slowly on the rise today. Said grouping's real income has risen less than $1,000 from January of '98 to the present. This could be a factor of strong union representation amongst the group, whose members enjoy good benefits and relative security in exchange for low salary.

For those who, like the author, found early greatness superseding higher educational goals but only long enough to make going back difficult or prohibitive, things are trending upwards, but at a terribly steep angle. While wages have risen around 15% in the last 10 years, the group started way below the no college crowd ($31K to $37.5K) and are making far less today ($36.5K) than those who finished ($45.5K) AND those who bucked it altogether ($38K).

So what does this all mean? These are numbers from the supposed "good years". People already seem spooked about not getting all they thought they would a couple years back from their homes, gas prices, military robots...

These were just some numbers I wanted to wrap my head around before really diving in to the more personal aspects of impending shortage.

More to come this week, but in the meantime: the aforementioned destroyed of everything (Hat Tip: Yglesias)