The unemployment rate is not as good as it seems.
On Friday, the Labor Department announced the overall jobless rate ticked down slightly to 6.7% in November. That’s much improved from the early days of the pandemic in April, when the overall rate was 14.7%.
But that number hides a crisis. The Black unemployment rate remains stubbornly high: At 10.3%, it is similar to what the overall jobless rate was at the height of the Great Recession. The unemployment rate for Black men is 11.2%.
And that is not unusual. Since the government began tracking Black unemployment in 1972, the rate has steadily remained about double the overall number. Black workers are typically the first fired and last hired in any crisis, including in the pandemic. After COVID-19 initially threw millions out of work, white workers were hired back at about twice the rate of Black workers.
Typically, policymakers haven’t paid all that much attention to the Black unemployment rate. If the jobless numbers are low overall, then most economists and lawmakers think the economy is doing pretty well.
That could change in President-elect Joe Biden’s administration. This summer, one of Biden’s top economic advisers, Jared Bernstein, co-authored a paper that points to a fresh way of looking at this information.
Instead of calibrating economic policy to the overall unemployment rate, Bernstein and co-author Janelle Jones suggest looking at the Black unemployment rate instead. The wonky term they use is “disaggregating” the data. | 