The conventional wisdom right now is that the economy stinks and a lot of people are throwing around a lot of big ideas about how to fix it — particularly the persistent stuck-in-the-mud reality of high unemployment.<\/p>\n
Currently about 9.1% of Americans can’t find jobs, a high enough number that it’s driving the political and cultural debate both in Washington and in Albany (and in state capitals around the US).<\/p>\n
But behind that big takeaway number is a lot of complexity that explodes some of the myths about our current economic struggles.<\/p>\n
For one thing, as this map from The Atlantic illustrates<\/a>, unemployment is incredibly uneven around the country.\u00a0 There are pockets of real malaise, with unemployment hitting between 14% and 25% of the workforce.<\/p>\n That’s devastating — the kind of thing that can tip whole communities into Depression-era level crisis.<\/p>\n But there are also huge swaths of the country where the situation is normal verging on the downright prosperous.<\/p>\n Another interesting wrinkle here is that some of the states that are suffering the most are parts of the US that were once touted as libertarian, union-free economic boom zones.<\/p>\n But now, “new frontier” states like Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada appear mired in the deepest slough of the recession, and six of the ten states with highest unemployment in the country are in the South.<\/p>\n