Yankee, Go South: More New England Unemployment Theories

Ask a question, get an answer: 

How do five of the six states of New England manage to post better-than-average unemployment numbers, despite non-bustling economies, high minimum wage laws and fairly employer-unfriendly regulatory structures? I speculated about this point the other day, and got an interesting variety of responses. 

Dig the theories from commenters Butler T. Reynolds, leviramsey and Stevo Darkly, as well as the strong unemployment/minimum wage correlation cited by Jersey Patriot.

I also got an interesting email response from Stanley T. Greer, newsletter editor for the National Right to Work Committee and senior research associate for the affiliated National Institute for Labor Relations Research: 

If I remember right, the three New England states you mentioned were Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.  They are all exceptional for one reason:  From 1999 to 2009, U.S. Census Bureau data show that the number of 25-34 year olds nationwide increased by 9.6%.  That is, there were 9.6% more people in this age bracket in 2009 than there had been in 1999.  But in Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut, along with the other New England states and a few other states, the number of 25-34 year-olds declined significantly over the last decade for which data are available.  In Vermont, it fell from 83,000 to 69,000 (17%), in Massachusetts, it fell from 939,000 to 856,000 (9%), and in Connecticut it fell from 446,000 to 411,000 (8%). 

A combination of low birth rates 25-35 years ago, persistent out-migration of young adults just before or shortly after they start families, and moderate to low immigration from abroad means the share of the people in the age brackets with the most employment volatility (I'm sure trends for 16-24 year olds are similar in these states, though I don't have the data before me), and the age brackets most likely to be affected by minimum wage hikes, is much lower in the New England states than it was just a few decades ago.  And lower than anywhere else in the country.  So New England, I posit, is using the Ebenezer Scrooge method to fight unemployment – by "reducing the surplus population [of potential employees]." 

(Age-adjusted state population data come from the most recent edition of the Statistical Abstract, plus another edition about a decade ago.  The latest data are available on line.  I can scan you a copy of the older data if you'd like.)

The trouble with this kind of unemployment chemotherapy is that it also wreaks havoc with your economy. You might not know it from listening to all the Republican presidential candidates except Gary Johnson, but something similar is happening nationwide as the rate of illegal immigration has gone negative. Funny how nobody's happy now the alleged problem of unfair competition for jobs has essentially disappeared. 

Desire Under the Elms, the original drama of New Englanders desperate to move to sunnier states. 

Comments

[Hugh Akston]

Galt bless you, Stevo Darkly.

[Almanian]

Second!

[Tulpa]

Seriously Tim? You're expending two blog posts searching for a pattern that isn't there.

[Episiarch]

This subject has already been adequately speculated upon. What really matters is that I can't believe the Seahawks beat the Giants. Convincingly. In 3 minutes.

[Brett L]

Eli had at least 2 bad passes saved by his receivers. One of those was eventually going to end up in a defender's hands.

[Episiarch]

Oh yeah, Eli was having a very bad end of game. Two interceptions in the last 3 minutes with one of them turned into a 80+ yard touchdown.

Oops. Of course, the Seahawks were merely lucky. The Giants were easily on their way to a touchdown when Eli threw the first bad pass.

[Heroic Mulatto]

persistent out-migration of young adults just before or shortly after they start families

I know this is anecdotal, but my experience here in N.H. is that after spending their early 20's banging their heads against the wall to begin their careers in a place like NYC, many folks in their early 30's are coming back to New England to start their families.

[leviramsey]

There's also a fairly substantial population of [generally] liberal folks from elsewhere in the country who find themselves with something approaching fuck you money who decide to move to Vermont or Western Massachusetts and semi-retire (whether buying some old farm and raising alpacas or something, or opening a quirky bookshop or whatever) with ideological compatriots. I'm in Franklin County, Mass. and there's no shortage of these types.

Not coincidentally, there are about five or six repair shops within 20 miles that specialize in Volvos and Saabs (and if they don't drive a Volvo or a Saab, they drive a Prius...).

[Heroic Mulatto]

Hey, I have a hobby farm! >_>

(I'd never drive a Prius though...)

[xenia onatopp]

Fuck all, Franklin County? That's even worse than Berkshire County, where I am, and I know this for a fact, having once lived in Greenfield. How Penn Jillette comes from that town is one of life's fascinating little mysteries.

[Res Publica Americana]

Without minimum wage laws, there'd be starving puppies and grannies on the sidewalks of every American city, great and small!

[Sacre Bleu]

You stupid fat Americans. To solve unemployment you mandate a 30 hour work week and double your staff.

[Esteban]

I grew up in the New England area and I was glad to leave. Run down cities and blue state leftists. The midwest, west and south are where the real future is.

[Res Publica Americana]

Not if the Reasonably Free Bloc of Several Southern and Central States(At Any Rate, Much Fucking Better than California or the Eastern Seabord) (tm) gets buried in the same statist shit New England is in. Let's pray it doesn't.

[GeneralAntilles]

The scary part, especially here in Florida, is that so many of the nut-job government and union pensioners from New England and Canada are ending up down here (especially the Tampa Bay area and Sarasota). The rest of us, of course, work for a living and don't have time to attend things like city council meetings so the unlimited-free-time pensioners clog up the political process with their leftist insanity.

The piece on Instapundit from a couple weeks ago applies.

[Ken Shultz]

I'd like to throw out for consideration that government regulation, high union membership, a higher percentage of government employees, etc., doesn't necessarily mean high unemployment at any given point in time.

If it did, that would mean unemployment would have been really high in the Soviet Union. The problem there wasn't that people were unemployed--it's that the fruit of their employment wasn't really worth anything.

We could have full employment next week if the government hired all the unemployed. Whether the fruit of their employed labor would be worth anything is another question entirely.

The fact is that our standing of living, over the long run, isn't tied to unemployment so much as it's tied to things like low inflation and productivity. Unemployment is just a symptom of the disease in other words. New England may do a good job of treating that symptom with government employees and union members, but I don't think very many people think of New England as the land of opportunity.

It's a great opportunity if you want to work in local or state government or if you have a PhD. But I feel sorry for the unwashed masses who have to produce enough to support all that deadweight in addition to their own standard of living...

If you're a union member being overpaid to screw in lug-nuts, or a government employee overpaid to sit on your ass all day, there's no reason to think the world would be a better place if you were only employed so long as what you did was worth more to somebody than what you were paid.

If more people in New England are employed and overpaid, then I guess that's good news for the lazy entitled slobs, but, of course, that's bad news for all the hardworking people who have to support their parasitic asses.

[Res Publica Americana]

Welcome to illogic, immorality, and unreason. They're in town forever!

[Southerner]

The state of the economy in general is all about value, not statistics. As you more or less pointed out, the Soviet Union had very little unemployment, but its economy sucked. In the years shortly after it collapsed, I remember reading reports that the Russians were allowing record wheat and potato harvests to rot in the field, but as my parents pointed out when I mentioned this to them, the Soviet Union had allowed that to happen a lot too: the commies just didn't any real grasp of how to bring stuff to market the way capitalists do.

Unemployment is a measure of poverty only inasmuch as the unemployed actually need jobs; as such, it's possible to have full employment and poverty at the same time (as in the Soviet Union) and also to have high unemployment and yet everyone relatively well-off (as in... no known real-life examples yet).

To give you some idea of how the latter could occur, I like to refer to the food replicators in the various Star Trek series and the food machine in Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. In each case, a machine that could produce so much food in exchange for so little energy would be a total blight on the employment of farmers and the food industry in general; millions of people would lose their jobs. In exchange, however, world hunger would be utterly eradicated along with everyone's food bills.

Taking the analogy further, if we ever have replicators that can produce other stuff as seen in the Star Trek series, that's going to lead to the collapse of other industries as well and maybe the loss of billions of jobs--but it also means that the cost of virtually everything will drop to zero and everyone will have really awesome clothes and computers and (probably) houses built by robots. When you can get all that stuff for free, who's going to want a job then? Most people's hobbies would become their new occupations. Money wouldn't cease to exist altogether, but there would be a sharp reduction in the amount of stuff one could buy with it; mostly only stuff with some kind of metaphysical value would still go for money: rare original paintings by famous artists, mint edition collectible baseball cards, and of course land (which even the replicators on Star Trek are--so far--incapable of reproducing).

That's why I've always thought of the Star Trek: Deep Space 9 series, particularly the episodes focusing on the relentlessly Randian Ferengi, as as the most realistic stories of the bunch. The future depicted is not as socialist as some of the dumber fans of the series suppose, it's just capitalistic in a somewhat subtler way, with money (particularly in the form of gold-pressed latinum) being spent on the scarce metaphysical goods people want instead of the relatively plentiful physical goods they already have for satisfying their basic needs. Bleeding-heart Keynesians and other economic fools could learn a lot from the economically wise and thrifty Ferengi.

[MJKatzTheWriter]

Finally...a 30 pound cooked lobster and a gallon of fried clams with really big bellies all for free!

Unless, of course, replicators are so expensive that only the Well Off could afford them...

Guess if I can't afford a replicator, I could always move to Maine! 🙂

Your scenario makes sense.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Wait, there's a new England now?

[jtuf]

Most of the NJ towns near me solve poverty by outlawing affordable housing.

[Mr Whipple]

Affordable housing is a Constitutional right in NJ. Each town has to build a certain number of "affordable" houses to offset the non-affordable(?) houses that are built.

Some of the ritzier towns were actually paying the shit towns to take their affordable housing off their hands. I think the state put a stop to that.

Rural towns like Newfield, do not have to comply because they do not have a public sewer system. Unfortunately, Newfield has to deal with low-level radioactive waste seeping in to the ground water from former defense contractor known as ShieldAlloy.

No matter how you look at it, Jersey is a fucking mess. Hell, this country is a fucking mess. Personally, I'm about to learn Mandarin from Roseta Stone, and not because I'm into Asian chicks.

[NJ Escapee]

Wonder how much Millville and Bridgeton were paid!

[Mr Whipple]

Woodlynne was paid a lot. I know that for a fact. It was in the papers. Cherry Hill and Voorhees paid them.

Millville and Bridgeton actually have a some decent new construction. On the edges, of course. I worked on a nice house out on Buckshutem Road.

[Tulpa]

Right, because the PRC doesn't have any issues with govt interference in housing and water pollution.

[jtuf]

The COAH requirements don't do much. A town of 4,000 near me lost a COAH lawsuit and it was forced to build 3 affordable homes.

[Drake]

COAH is being dissolved by Christie. NJ is schizophrenic. With one hand they beat the town mayors to create "low-income housing". With the other hand, they whale on them for "open-space". They will sue if you don't do both.

[Neu Mejican]

Tulpa's on the money, but I love Stevo Darkly's take.

[Ken Shultz]

Stevo's the king.

[Tulpa]

Once again the clown beats the philosopher. Story of my life.

[Ken Shultz]

Stevo is way smarter than you.

Just because he's always been hilarious in addition to being smart, just because he's funny? That doesn't mean he isn't smarter than you.

P.S. You imagine yourself a philosopher?

Really?!

[Old Mexican]

The trouble with this kind of unemployment chemotherapy is that it also wreaks havoc with your economy.

There's not enough productive people to replace those that retire, and services that require low-skill labor becomes more scarce and, thus, more expensive. It's a death spiral, because you cannot stop time.

[New Englander]

Our housing market is still ridiculously high, so owners didn't experience the same tanking of equity that other regions did. From that, all else follows: less deleveraging, less demand destruction, less unemployment.

[xenia onatopp]

The ridiculously high housing costs are a clue here. One of the secrets of the so-called Massachusetts Miracle, so often and so wrongly credited to Michael Dukakis, was housing prices. I lived right outside of Boston through most of the eighties, and in the mid-eighties in Somerville a 2 bedroom apartment rented for $750/month. Wages were ridiculously high due to the labor shortage; high school kids wouldn't work at McDonalds for less than $5/hour, at a time when the minimum wage was under $3.50/hour. So what's the catch? Simple: jobs, especially tech-sector jobs, were going begging because businesses found it extremely difficult to induce their employees elsewhere to relocate to MA due to the high cost of housing, especially in those suburbs considered most desirable by yuppies. It was during this period that my parents were able to sell their house in Lexington, purchased for $20,000 in 1967, for a little over $300,000. The only real mystery is how, in spite of the continued outward migration and constantly dropping population, the state's housing remains so overpriced.

[canada goose dame jakke]

Wonderful blog! I genuinely love how it is easy on my eyes and the information are well written.

[Former Legal Immigrant]

Gee, how the heck do we replace the ethically challenged and lowly educated illegal immigrant work force?

If the US only had a backlog of people who played by the rules and applied for legal immigration papers....

[Drake]

Told ya!

Left New England for good in my early 20's and never looked back. The Marine Corps was full of Yankees who will never return home.

I had New England Yankees with me in grad school in Los Angeles. I worked with them when I lived in Las Vegas and North Carolina. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, they are everywhere.

Everywhere you go will don't have to look hard to find Yankees who left in the great New England diaspora.

The taxes, the crap weather, the cost of living, and the obnoxious people were all a relief to escape.

At this point, I couldn't return to MA legally without disposing of my guns (some of which I bought there in the 80's). I could see a summer place in New Hampshire in my future - the rest of the New England can screw themselves.

[xenia onatopp]

Yo, my 22 year old son, the Marine, saw the corps as his best way out of decaying factory towns full of condescending yuppie scum on one side and no-future losers on the other. Having aspirations, and realizing that most of his friends and their parents fall squarely into the second camp, he knew better than to stick around. He says it's the best decision he ever made, and that the only way he'll ever live in MA again is if he chooses to go to graduate school at MIT; he's already halfway to a bachelor's degree by going to college at night while in Hawaii (courtesy of the USMC) between deployments, just so he won't have to waste any time later. Although who knows? His MOS is officially CBRN defense, but in his two tours in Afghanistan, the first time he was assigned to work directly under the battalion commander co-ordinating troop movements (chosen for high ASVAB score and computer literacy), and this time around he's a squad leader, patrolling for IEDs and making nice with village elders. He planned on doing his four and out, but with under 3 years in he's a corporal due for promotion on 11/1, has been battalion Marine of the Quarter once and 3rd Division Marine of the Quarter once and only has one PFT score ever that was under 300, so they'd like him to stick around. He's been offered a chance at counterintelligence, which he's really fascinated by, and he's already passed the screening while in Afghanistan, so pending his security clearance he'll probably re-enlist, it's a five year gig with a 50K bonus so plenty of time to finish college before he's out.

Which is all more than I meant to say, truly didn't start out planning to brag about my son, sorry. Anyway, the point is he's out for good, and my husband's youngest kid (from his first marriage) will be 18 in two years, and once that child support obligation is over the plan is for us to get the hell out, too, probably to South Carolina. My husband is in construction-dependent work (carpet/tile/laminate installation) and self-employed, so for him moving south means following the work anyway, and my clerical skills are pretty transportable, so what's the point of staying in Western MA? The fucking weather? The $300 monthly heating oil bills? I mean it's beautiful here and all, but it's my understanding that we're not the only state that has trees. And yeah, Florida and the Carolinas are full of escapees from this area, so we'll have plenty of company.

[Drake]

Good for him and good luck.

[MJKatzTheWriter]

Lol. Loved it all!

I grew up in Mass. but left it pretty much for the same reasons you cite here. Going South is good for another reason, too. The majority of people seem to be so much friendlier!

Just don't go into a bar and say that you're glad the North won the war! Lol.

[cheap The north face jackets]

The North Face Men's Reversible Jacket Grey It is an 8 km each way walk along dirt road to the base of Mt. Everest. You ascend north face sale to the moraine and shortly encounter a nunnery ruined during the Cultural Revolution.

[Beats by Dr.Dre Tour]

Write in at [e-mail] to
Monster Headphones tell us. Maybe we will use your response itself But, for now we just need to understand the concept of inflation. After all, the main objective is to figure out how inflation affects the three friends we met last time

[Canada Goose MEN'S SNOW MANTRA]

Judy Clark and Joyce Paton.Hip hop artist, Drake, collaborated with Canada Goose Coats jacket maker Canada Goose to launch his own limited edition Canada Goose Chiliwax Jacket. The coat is said to be retailed at $900 and will be available at select retailers across North America.The old-school jacket factory unveiled the October's Very Own X Canada Goose Chilliwack Jacket,

[Christian Louboutin]

Use good Christian Louboutin lady peep 150mm camel sense. Protect yourself. Buy via our Christian Louboutin Pumps authorized retailers.

[Monster Beats]

After taking a Beats Solo HD High Definition On-ear Headphones with ControlTalk white back seat to tiny white earbuds for the better part of the last decade

[Monster Beats]

In the network, you can found many articles of the headphones review. But did you found that most of them are write for the expensive high-end headphones, rarely involves a number of low-end products. Cheap Monster Beats In fact, high-end headphones will make you feel a very good sound quality. However, the high-end headphones need a high-end playback equipment to drive, for the average users, a good quality and low price headphones is what they want buy.In the market, the major headphones brands have a lot of low-end products, the price of these headphones will normally be between $100 to $200.

[Coach Bags]

If Coach Handbags you're a girl who loves to have some really cool, long lasting stuff in her wardrobe, then you probably own a Coach bag. But still, you may be a girl who loves cool, long lasting stuff and you don't have one - yet. It's time to go out and get yourself one. I'll tell you why in a few moments, but first, who is CoachWe all know Gucci, YSL, DKNY and all the famous bag designers, but maybe not Coach.Coach is a Coach Handbags Outlet leading American designer of luxury goodies, all the way from handbags to purses to jewellery and sunglasses to shoes. They have been around for quite a while - a group of artisans came together in 1941 in Manhattan and founded a family run workshop that was based in their loft. Their unique selling point was to use the best leather possible, and they would treat it till they got it right. They are around to date, and this tells you that they must be producing some great stuff, rightAnyway, back to why a Coach handbag is so cool1. They are made of simply the most beautiful leather. Coach bags have a hallmark - soft leather, and it's not by fluke. It actually brings us to our second reason why Coach bags are so great

[Canada Goose]

OVO and CG joined forces months canada goose jackets in advance with closed door Canada Goose conferences, pouring around facts with a good tooth comb and tweaking style components of the iconic Canada Goose Chilliwack Bomber. With the finish outcome being the prefect OVO/CG collaboration.