Economy

The table below shows the change (’000) in total payroll employment, government payroll employment and private sector payroll employment by state in July 2010. The data used in the table was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on August 20,2010 and is the most recent available.

State
Total
Government
Private

Alabama
2.1
-3.7
5.8

Alaska
1.1
-0.8
1.9

Arizona
5.3
-0.2
5.5

Arkansas
3.6
-3.5
7.1

California
-9.4
-23.1
13.7

Colorado
1.9
-0.8
2.7

Connecticut
-1.3
-2.9
1.6

Delaware
1.1
-0.8
1.9

District of Columbia
17.8
8.9
8.9

Florida
5.7
-3.4
9.1

Georgia
5.6
-8.1
13.7

Hawaii
5.1
2.5
2.6

Idaho
0.8
-0.9
1.7

Illinois
-20.2
-5.2
-15

Indiana
8.7
-4.3
13

Iowa
1.7
-1.3
3

Kansas
4.9
1.8
3.1

Kentucky
-8
-4.8
-3.2

Louisiana
3.5
-5.9
9.4

Maine
5.5
0.6
4.9

Maryland
0.5
-2.9
3.4

Massachusetts
13.2
-6
19.2

Michigan
27.8
5.4
22.4

Minnesota
9.8
-9.1
18.9

Mississippi
-4.9
-4.4
-0.5

Missouri
2.7
-0.9
3.6

Montana
1
-3.5
4.5

Nebraska
1.6
0.7
0.9

Nevada
-0.1
1
-1.1

New Hampshire
-4.9
-2.9
-2

New Jersey
-21.2
-18.1
-3.1

New Mexico
2.2
-4
6.2

New York
10.5
-18.5
29

North Carolina
-29.8
-27.3
-2.5

North Dakota
1.6
0.7
0.9

Ohio
1.8
-8.7
10.5

Oklahoma
7
1.9
5.1

Oregon
-3
-5.2
2.2

Pennsylvania
-7
-10.4
3.4

Rhode [...]

Here’s a picture I snapped at the Lowe’s store in Westborough in Massachusetts a couple of days ago:

As you can see the New England Patriots-branded 5-gallon bucket is $6.98 while the store-brand 5-gallon bucket is $2.54.
That’s quite a difference in price for two fairly simple products sold next to each other. In the 4 P [...]

The combined population of California, Texas, New York and Florida is about 100 million, or one-third of the population of the United States, so the unemployment rate in those states have a substantial impact on the national unemployment rate (currently 9.5%).
The table below shows the unemployment rate for those four states over the past [...]

The tables below show unemployment rates for Massachusetts, Minnesota, Virginia and Washington 2006 - 2010, from the height of the real estate bubble through the Panic of 2008, the subsequent Great Recession and slow recovery. Since I have a bit of a Mass-centric view on the Republic I have set the tables as head to [...]

It was announced today that 2,556 solar power panels will help supply Patriot Place - the retail and restaurant complex adjacent to New England Patriots home field Gillette Stadium - with electricity. Here’s a picture I took yesterday of some of the panels:

Mass Inc.’s magazine CommonWealth has a terrific interview with Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. You should absolutely read the interview. I’ll include just this one brief quote in which he addresses Massachusetts’s jaw-droppingly weak job creation performance over the past two decades:
We put too many of [...]

There is a certain ebb and flow in the debate over whether U.S.-style capitalism is better than Europe’s welfare economies or vice versa. Most of the time the U.S. has the upper hand while Europeans and their American advocates play defense, but every now and then Europe enjoys a stretch of faster of faster growth [...]

The payroll and employment report from Bureau of Labor Statistics for November 2009 suggest that the US economy is entering a so-called V-shaped recovery, rather than a slower and more painful U- or W-shaped one.
Not only were only 11,000 jobs lost last month, the figure for October was revised upwards. Initial unemployment claims are showing [...]

A couple of months ago I quoted a local politician in Sweden recounting how government revenue projections are repeatedly revised downwards because of the terrible toll the recession in the United States is taking on the global economy’s export-driven participants. The local newspaper in my native city reports this weekend on another town that’s facing [...]

The New York Times reports on stagnating test scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress:
Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of the United States’ 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970s. This was largely [...]