Black and White Unemployment Over Time

Here are monthly unemployment rates for whites and blacks since 1972. The green line is the gap between the two rates to see if there has been any systematic changes over time. The shaded areas are NBER dated recessions:

Here is the rate for men only:

For women only:

And for teens:

Some observations:

1. The rate is always higher for blacks than for whites.
2. In most, but not all, cases the gap between whites and blacks is larger than the rate for whites.
3. There does appear to be a long-run decline in the gap since the early 1980s, but recently the decline has been reversed.
4. The gap follows the trend. When unemployment rises, for example, the gap rises indicating that the black unemployment rate rises faster than the white rate during recessions. This will also mean that the black rate will fall faster in recoveries. [Update: graph of black to white ratio: smaller, larger]
5. There is a clear difference in volatility. The series for whites is much smoother than the series for lacks.

A more general observation: In the first graph, notice how the unemployment rate stops rising at the end of the recessions in the early 1970s and 1980s, but the recession in the early 1990s is different. Even after the recession ended, unemployment continued rising, than begins a long-term decline. In the most recent recession, unemployment continued rising after it officially ended as well. This is even more evident in the rates for men in the second graph, black men in particular.

Update: I was asked about participation statistics. These are in the continuation frame.

First, the overall rates for blacks and whites:

Here is the rate for men only:

For women only:

And for teens:

And here are the gaps. The only gap that is positive (black-white) is for women:

This is the black to white ratio:

Comments

[Phi]

Could you plot the ratio of black vs. white? This may be a better indication, if there is a long term trend towards covergence. It does not appear so.

[Mark Thoma]

Here the ratio of black to white. Interesting. Here's a larger version since I'm not constrained by the blog size.

[cm]

I'm sure the larger short-term volatility is sampling based because of a smaller sampled population.

Furthermore I would expect the size of the gap to correlate positively with the aggregate level of unemployment.

As especially of late I don't set much stock by the accuracy of unemployment indicators, "irregularities" in the gap may as well be related to incorrectly reported unemployment.

Can we see a correlation with the inverse/complemented participation rate, effectively taking that as a proxy to actual unemployment?

[Mark Thoma]

I originally intended to pull participation rates too to look for systematic differences, but pulling these data from the BLS was a bit tedious so I stopped with the unemployment rates. If I can find a bit of time later, I'll go back and grab participation.

[chuck roast]

Can you correct for incarceration?
Prisoners are not included in the unemployment stats, however, it's no secret that the jailbird population has exploded over this period...let me guess the race of the predominant class of prisoners...black.
I would also guess that the increasing imprisoning of African-Americans (not to mention pre-mature deaths) acts to underestimate offical Black unemployment figures, and the "...long run decline in the gap since the early 1980s" may actually look more like the current flat-ass inverted yield curve.

[C Roast]

I know, dead guys don't appear in the unemployment statistics. But, it would be safe to say that the 300 people who died of weapons-related violent deaths in my area two years ago were 1., African-American young men, and 2. not appearing in the employment figures for '03 and '04.

[Lord]

Unemployment used to measure those that hadn't found a job. Now it measures those that haven't left the workforce.

[cm]

Lord: Used to, when? As much as I'm aware, despite several "revisions" to the workforce definition, the definition of "having a job or having made specific efforts to find one in the past 4 weeks" has been there for a long time. Give or take some clarification "update" what qualifies as the latter.

Otherwise I'd say in this age where the dual-income-desired family is by far the norm, the complement/inverse of the participation rate should be a good proxy to unemployment. With the caveat that I'm not sure whether e.g. prisoners or disability receivers are excluded.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/opinion/16branch.html?ex=1295067600&en=7899cfbc2332a4f3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

January 16, 2006

Globalizing King's Legacy
By TAYLOR BRANCH

Baltimore

OFFICIAL celebrations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday turn 20 years old this week.

Like that of Dr. King's late colleague Rosa Parks, the name behind our 10th national holiday carries more resonance than impact - noble, universal, yet bounded by race and time. The annual King event draws tributes to the end of legal segregation, reprises of landmark oratory and varied appraisals of problems for minorities. Yet despite our high-stakes national commitment to advance free government around the world, we consistently marginalize or ignore Dr. King's commitment to the core values of democracy.

His own words present a vast and urgent landscape for freedom. "No American is without responsibility," Dr. King declared only hours after the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" repulse of voting rights marchers in Selma, Ala. "All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life," he added. "The struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land."

His public appeal gathered an overnight host from many states behind a blockaded vigil. When white supremacists beat one volunteer to death with impunity, Dr. King responded with prophetic witness against the grain of violence. "Out of the wombs of a frail world," he assured mourners, "new systems of equality and justice are being born."

Selma released waves of political energy from the human nucleus of freedom. Ordinary citizens ventured across cultural barriers, aroused a transnational conscience and engaged all three branches of government. After the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dr. King claimed that the distinctive methods of sharecroppers and students had revived nothing less than the visionary heritage of the American Revolution. "The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation," he told the Synagogue Council of America. "Rather it is a historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society."

This effusive axiom went unnoticed, but the blessings of freedom did ripple far beyond the black victims of caste. As Dr. King predicted, the civil rights movement liberated segregationists themselves. The integrity of law enforcement rose with a stark decline in racial terror. The Atlanta Braves joined the first professional sports teams to spring up at integrated stadiums, and business radiated Sun Belt growth into a region of historic poverty. In elections, new black voters generated the 20th century's first two-party competition to displace the ossified regimes of white supremacy. The stigma of segregation no longer curtailed a Southerner's chances for high national office, and fresh candidates rose swiftly to leadership in both national parties.

Parallel tides opened doors for the first female students at some universities and most private colleges, then the military academies. In 1972, civil rights agitation over doctrines of equal souls produced the first public ordination of a female rabbi in the United States, and the Episcopal Church soon introduced female clergy members in spite of schismatic revolts to preserve religious authority for men. Pauli Murray, a lawyer who was one of the pioneer priests, had pursued a legal appeal that in 1966 overturned several state laws flatly prohibiting jury service by women. "The principle announced seems so obvious today," Dr. Murray would write in a memoir, "that it is difficult to remember the dramatic break the court was making." ...

[anne]

http://www.bartleby.com/114/2.html

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963).
The Souls of Black Folk. 1903.

Of the Dawn of Freedom

THE PROBLEM of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with Negroes? Peremptory military commands, this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro problems of to-day.

It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men called the Freedmen's Bureau,—one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.

The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women, with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,—a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, in Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler's action was approved, but Fremont's was hastily countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently. "Hereafter," he commanded, "no slaves should be allowed to come into your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call for them deliver them." Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that their masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with forts and plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength to the Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and producers. "They constitute a military resource," wrote Secretary Cameron, late in 1861; "and being such, that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too plain to discuss." So gradually the tone of the army chiefs changed; Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives, and Butler's "contrabands" were welcomed as military laborers. This complicated rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering fugitives became a steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies marched.

Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year's, 1863. A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist. Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring: "What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and children?" ...

[anne]

http://www.bartleby.com/114/12.html

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963).
The Souls of Black Folk. 1903.

Of Alexander Crummell

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?" And then all helplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, "O World of Worlds, how shall man make you one?" ...

[spencer]

I wonder how much of the drop in the teen participation rate relates to the minimum wage. Since the minimum wage has fallen in real terms over the last quarter century it would be logical to suppect the biggest impact would be in the supply of teenage labor.

[spencer]

CM -- I suspect Lords comments are a reflection of his judgement about peoples behavior, not changes in the formal definitions used by the BLS.

[Lord]

It is more a reflection of the difficulty of finding suitable employment and the length of time to do so. More people now give up than are hired.

[cm]

I know people (who apparently have some kind of financial nest egg or rainy-day fund) who have found a measure of comfort in accepting a more frugal lifestyle instead of participating in the rat race at any price.

says...

hello