Mapping the black stuff

1. James Ball, Dan Milmo and Mark Ferguson, ‘Half UK's young black males are un-

employed’, Guardian, 10 March 2012, at: www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/mar/09/half- uk-young-black-men-unemployed

2. Jahoda et al., Marienthal, p. 52.

3. Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, pp. 132–3.

4. Franklin Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1933, at:

www.bartleby.com/124/pres49.html

5. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1962 [1937], pp. 73, 75.

6. Japan's unemployment peaked at 5.4%. See Shirakawa, ‘Deleveraging and growth’.

Eurozone unemployment in March 2013 hit 12.2%, according to official statistics at:

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_expla​ined/index.php/Unemployment_statistics#Unemployment_trends 7. The exact figure was 22.9%. With farming excluded, the rate was higher still – reaching

31.7% of the non-farming workforce in 1932. David R. Weir, ‘A century of US

unemployment 1890–1990’, in Roger L. Ransom, Richard Sutch and Susan B. Carter, Research in Economic History, JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, 1992, vol. 14, Table D3, pp.

341–3.

8. Average for 1921–38 was 10.91%. This is the all-workers rate, lower than the more

commonly quoted insured-workers rate. Figure taken from Table 13.4 in Timothy J. Hatton,

‘Unemployment and the labour market, 1870–1939’, in Floud and Johnson, Cambridge Economic History, vol. 2, p. 371.

9. Professor Timothy Hatton's notes on his research profile. Available on the Essex University

10. Official figures for total number in employment from various Labour Market Statistics editions: June 2008 edition, 29.55 million; June 2010 edition, 28.86 million; June 2013 edition, 29.76 million. This implies that there was a 2.3% fall between early 2008 and early 2010, close to the trough on this measure, and that a new peak in employment was reached by 2013.

11. For more detail on how and why incapacity claimant numbers soared in the 1980s and 1990s, see Work and Pensions Select Committee of the House of Commons, Fourth Report of Parliamentary Session 2002–3, at:

www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/c​mselect/cmworpen/401/40104.htm 12. ‘“Total” unemployment in the UK is nearly five million – almost double the official

13. Overall official employment rates for Britain and America over the course of the Great Recession are charted in ‘Mustn't grumble’, The Economist, 29 September 2012, at:

http://www.economist.com/node/21563766

14. Dated this way, most recessions drag on longer – for so long, in fact, that the chart has to truncate the 1990s ‘jobs recession’. Official data was supplied on request by the Office for National Statistics.

15. For more on the relative performance of different UK industries at this time, see: Sue Bowden and David M. Higgins, ‘British industry in the interwar years’, in Floud and Johnson, Cambridge Economic History, vol. 2, pp. 374–402, esp. pp. 382–23 for international productivity differentials.

16. ‘Graduate’ includes those who have completed advanced vocational as well as academic tertiary study. ‘Dropout’ in Britain is here coded as anyone who failed to secure a pass at O-level/GCSE; American dropouts are simply those who fail to graduate from high school.

17. Mark Thomas, ‘Labour market structure and the nature of unemployment in interwar Britain’, in B. Eichengreen and T. Hatton (eds), Interwar Unemployment in International Perspective, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1988, p. 123.

18. The median dropout penalty in this 39-year series is 9.7 percentage points.

19. In particular, the ‘dropout’ category in Britain covers anyone who fails to secure the

equivalent of a pass at O-level/GCSE, even if they have some lower qualifications; this is a broader category than American dropouts – those who fail to graduate from high school.

20. UK data from General Household Survey (GHS) (1972–2005) and Labour Force Survey (LFS) (1983–2011); American data from Current Population Survey throughout (1972–

2011). See Yaojun Li, ‘Hard times, worklessness and unemployment in Britain and the USA (1972–2011)’, Institute for Social Change Working Paper 2013–4, Manchester, 2013, at:

www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/socialchange/publica​tions/working/documents/Ethnicunemploymentand​worklessnessunderhardtimesinGBandUSA​1972to2011.pdf The data shown in the text is a slightly modified version of the British panel of Figure 9, p.

27. We are grateful to Yaojun Li for supplying it in simplified form.

21. Consider 1985, for example, a year when the ‘unemployment penalty’ that British dropouts faced compared with graduates was 9.3 percentage points. Yaojun Li's underlying data suggests that the penalty for not attending college (the gap between the college-educated and the intermediate educational group) was only about one third of that, at 3.4 points.

22. In 1992, the ‘unemployment penalty’ that British dropouts faced was 8.0 percentage points.

Yaojun Li's underlying data implies that the penalty for not attending college (the gap between the college-educated and the intermediate group) was approaching two-thirds of that, at 5.2 points.

23. In 2010, in our American data, the ‘unemployment penalty’ that dropouts faced was 14.0 percentage points. Yaojun Li's underlying data suggests that the penalty for not attending college (the gap between the college-educated and the intermediate educational group) was half of that, 7.1 points. In all previous years high-school graduates without college had less than half the disadvantage of the dropouts.

24. See analysis of official data by the Economic Policy Institute and others for the Associated Press. ‘Half of recent college grads underemployed or jobless, analysis says’, Associated Press, 23 April 2012, at:

www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2012/04/half_of_r​ecent_college_grads_u.html 25. Correspondence with the author, July 2013.

26. David Willetts, The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children's future – and why they should give it back, Atlantic Books, London, 2010.

27. Hatton, ‘Unemployment and the labour market, 1870–1939’, p. 352.

28. ibid., p. 353.

29. For more on the contrasting fates of the young and the elderly in the Great Depression and the Great Recession in both Europe and the US, see David Runciman, ‘Stiffed’ (review of The Occupy Handbook), London Review of Books, 25 October 2012, at:

www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n20/david-runciman/stiffed

30. OECD figures for 2012 put the Spanish youth unemployment rate at 53.2%. See OECD,

‘Employment and labour markets: Key tables’, 2013, Table 2: ‘Youth unemployment rate % of youth labour force (15–24)’, at: www.oecd-ilibrary.org/employment/youth-

unem​ployment-rate_20752342-table2

31. Department for Education/ONS, ‘NEET Statistics – Quarterly Brief – Quarter 1 2013’, 2013, at:

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach​ment_data/file/201104/Quarterly_Brie​f_NEET_Q1_2013_pdf.pdf For more on the imperfect overlap between the NEET and unemployment categories, see:

Jack Britton, Paul Gregg, Lindsey Macmillan and Sam Mitchell, The Early Bird:

Preventing young people becoming a Neet statistic, University of Bristol Economic Department and CMPO, Bristol, 2011, p. 13. For 18-year-olds, for example, this analysis shows that while 8% of the cohort was both unemployed and out of education/training, a further 6% of the cohort were workless and not doing education/training but not classed as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work.

32. UK data from GHS (1972–2005) and LFS (1983–2011); American data from Current Population Survey throughout (1972–2011). We show a variant of the data in Li, ‘Hard

times, worklessness and unemployment’, p. 21, Figure 3. We are grateful to Yaojun Li for supplying his latest data aggregated across the sexes.

33. The long-term convergence in overall employment rates for the two sexes is visible in the

‘worklessness’ rather than the ‘unemployment’ series, which is included – for both the UK and the US – in Li, ‘Hard times, worklessness and unemployment’, p. 19, Figure 1.

34. This is an updated version of the data in the ‘unemployment’ US panel of Figure 1, from ibid., p. 19, which was kindly supplied by Yaojun Li.

35. The overall UK gender gap figures quoted here are calculated using the official annual time-series obtained from the ONS on request. On the differential impact of austerity on women's jobs, the female headcount in local government has plunged by 253,600 since 2010, while the number of men in local government jobs is down only 104,700 – according to ONS data published by the Local Government Association. These cuts left 1.43 million women and 452,300 men in local authority jobs. See Katie Allen, ‘Public sector austerity measures hitting women hardest’, Guardian, 2 July 2013, at:

www.theguardian.com/business/2013/jul/01/public-sector-austerity-measures-women 36. In a few boom years – 1999 and 2000, and also the immediate run-up to the Great

Recession – the penalty fell below 5 points, but never below 4.

37. Li, ‘Hard times, worklessness and unemployment’, pp. 12–17.

38. James Ball, Dan Milmo and Mark Ferguson, ‘Half UK's young black males are un- employed’, Guardian, 10 March 2012.

39. UK data from GHS (1972–2005) and LFS (1983–2011); American data from Current Population Survey throughout (1972–2011). We show a simplified version of Li, ‘Hard times, worklessness and unemployment’, p. 23, Figure 5. We are grateful to Yaojun Li for supplying his latest data, aggregated across the sexes.

40. Measured in the same way, the ‘penalty’ for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in Britain soared to 24 percentage points in 1984 and 21 points in 1994, although, when this penalty rose again in the more recent recession (by which time the Pakistani element at least was better established) it remained in single figures. See Li, ‘Hard times, worklessness and

unemployment’, p. 23, Figure 5 for the full time-series for all major minorities, disaggregated by sex.

41. Measured in the same way, the ‘penalty’ for Hispanics peaked at 7 percentage points in 1983, but barring the single recessionary year of 1993 it was never otherwise above 5 points, and before the Great Recession, in 2007, it had slipped below 2 points. The Great Recession has since pushed it up, but only to 4 points. See Li, ‘Hard times, worklessness and unemployment’, p. 23, Figure 5 for the full time-series for all minorities, disaggregated by sex.

42. Michael Greenwood looks across countries and compares the number of residential moves per year and finds that in the US, 19% of people moved in 1971 and 18% of people moved

in 1981. In the UK the corresponding numbers were 12% and 10%, indicating that little more than half as many moved. (See M. Greenwood, ‘Internal migration in developed countries’, in M. Rosenzweig and O. Stark (eds), Handbook of Population and Family Economics, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1997, pp. 647–720.) People also often move further in the US than in the UK: one study found that for every 1,000 people in the population, the number moving at least 50 km each year was 46 in the US but only 15 in the UK (Larry Long, Migration and Residential Mobility in the United States, Russell Sage Foundation, Chicago, IL, 1988).

43. See Li, ‘Hard times, worklessness and unemployment’, p. 25, Figure 7 for full regional time-series of unemployment rates in both countries, for men and women separately.

44. Regional unemployment rates varied from 7.2% in the South to 7.8% in the West. See US Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Economic news release’, Table 1, at:

www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.t01.htm

45. Recent growth of Gross Value Added in London and the South East represented 52.2% of that across the UK, according to analysis of official data by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at Manchester University, reported in Aditya Chakrabortty,

‘London's economic boom leaves rest of Britain behind’, Guardian, 23 October 2013.

46. Li, ‘Hard times, worklessness and unemployment’, pp. 12–17.

47. The South comprises the standard government regions: South East, South West and East Anglia, but excludes London, whose labour market is very different. The North/Midlands includes the North West, Yorkshire and Humber, the East and West Midlands, but excludes the far North East, which our analysis lumps in with the peripheral economies of Scotland and Wales. Data for all regions – for both the UK and the US, and for men and women separately – is shown in Li, ‘Hard times, worklessness and unemployment’, p. 25, Figure 7.

Yaojun Li kindly supplied the data aggregated across the sexes on request. The underlying data is from GHS (1972–2005) and LFS (1983–2011).

48. Jahoda et al., Marienthal, pp. 45–65; Chapter 6.

49. Paul Gregg and Jonathan Wadsworth, ‘Unemployment and inactivity in the 2008–2009 recession’, Economic and Labour Market Review, 4:8 (2010), p. 45.

50. ONS, ‘Labour market statistics: Statistical bulletin, July 2013’, Table 9(1), at:

www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_315111.pdf

51. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Long-term unemployment experience of the jobless’, at:

www.bls.gov/opub/ils/summary_10_05/long_term_unemployment.htm

52. This pattern of increasingly concentrated unemployment has developed in Australia, about the only rich country to avoid an outright recession after 2008. On spatial concentration of unemployment in lower-income neighbourhoods, see Bob Gregory and Boyd Hunter, ‘The macroeconomy and the growth of ghettos of urban poverty in Australia’, CEPRD Discussion Paper 325, 1995, at: http://cbe.anu.edu.au/research/papers/ceprdpapers/DP325.pdf On the

53.

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