Unemployment Rates by Metropolitan Area

Business fluctuations can vary across regions. That’s probably obvious.

And the legacy media likes to accentuate the bad news. That’s probably obvious too.

Combine those, and with business conditions, you tend to get emphasis on the worst outcomes, not the variety of outcomes.

So I really liked this graphic:

This shows unemployment rates, by metropolitan area, in California over the last 4 years.

What you can see is that California is definitely on the mend. You can also see that the coast is doing better than other parts of the state. But you can also see that there’s a high degree of correlation between the unemployment rates.

Yet, my guess is that on the news, you’d hear a lot of reports about Yuba City and Merced, and not too many about San Bernadino or Salinas.

I mostly liked the graphic; you can just skim the original article, entitled “California Finds Economic Gloom Starting to Lift” in the November 28 issue of The New York Times.

N.B. Sorry about the shading … The Times website is getting persnickety about how many articles I’ve looked at this month.