Blog Critique about unemployment rates in the Midwest and Southern regions

Spencer Parsons

Blog Critique

In response to the original blog post Midwest, Southern States Register Lowest Unemployment by Sarah Portlock of the Wall Street Journal, I agree with her overall views about the ways the unemployment rate has decreased the most in the Midwest and Southern regions of the United States. In broader terms, throughout the country there has still been a steady improvement with 75% of the states registering a decline in their unemployment rate since May of last year.

The substantial decrease in overall unemployment in the Midwest and Southern regions can be explained through two contributing factors; the growth and expansion of our economies job market and the come back of our real estate market. The author gives several other examples about recent trends, but these are two broad areas that I think she left out that could be viewed as viable reasons for the low unemployment. In particular, the Midwest has a substantial amount of blue collar and manual labor jobs. During the most recent recession, thousands of people in this area lost their jobs due to a low demand in their field of work. With the recent rise of our economy, these jobs are re-opening and the supply of workers is low while the demand for production is steadily increasing. Factory and construction workers in this region are two specific fields of work that have benefitted from climb back from the recession and allowed the unemployment to decrease.

The southern region has much of the same qualities as the Midwest in terms of job market opportunities; one in particular is farming. Production rates for agricultural farming were down in recent years due to natural causes and a decrease in the demand for their particular area of skill.

The overall unemployment of a state or region can be viewed in three categories; Frictional, Structural, and Voluntary. I would believe that this article could be understood more clearly if we had statistics and breakdowns of the specific areas of unemployment. Looking at statistics of people who are actively looking for a job and those who are out of a job due to the lack of demand for their skill set would provide better results showing just how successful the decrease of unemployment was over the course of a year.

In my opinion, I think it is just as important to note that the overall payroll for some states in these two regions has regularly increased since this time last year. People are now able to find work easier as a direct result from our economies growing job market.