This animated graph, produced by the TellTaleChart, illustrates the unprecedented spike in long-term unemployment during and after the Great Recession.  The current median duration of unemployment (or weeks out of work) represents a dramatic departure from decades of unemployment trends.  As the producer glumly observes, “The median duration of unemployment was already at 20 weeks when the recession began.  It climbed to over 25 weeks in the summer of 2010 and has settled in, now almost three years into the recovery, at well above 20 weeks.  This of course is no recovery at all.”  The duration of unemployment in Oklahoma nearly doubled between 2006 and 2010, with the latest data putting the median weeks out of work in the state at 12.3 weeks.

View other clips from OKPolicy’s “Watch This’ video series:

Packed Oklahoma prisons, rising costs

Creativity & Learning

The Great Recession

Making Ends Meet: The Medicare Generation

A tale of two (Oklahoma) cities

What’s up this week at Oklahoma Policy Institute? The Weekly Wonk is dedicated to this week’s events, publications, and blog posts.

This week at OK Policy, we interviewed Steven Dow about recent controversy at the Oklahoma Commission for Human Services.  We pointed out that state leaders can’t rely on growth revenue to fund infrastructure repair and other priorities if they continue to cut (or even eliminate) the income tax.

Former State Treasurer Scott Meacham explains on the OK Policy blog that Oklahoma’s Rural and Small Business Tax Credit initiatives end up costing the state hundreds of millions in tax revenues.  The blog also featured a post on asset-building as an anti-poverty strategy.  Our director David Blatt was a guest this week on Studio Tulsa, discussing the importance of the income tax in adequately funding state government and essential services for Oklahomans.  Oklahoma Policy Institute’s director was also quoted in two articles this week on federal income tax liability for low-income households and the role of unemployment benefits during a recession.

In the Know, Policy Notes

• Tthe Economix blog examines whether it is more cost-effective to direct resources to college students or to preschoolers and kindergarteners in order to increase college completions over the longer term.
• Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder discover that immigration is correlated with falling crime rates.
• Bloomberg reports on how municipalities and state agencies, including the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority, are taking advantage of historically low interest rates to refinance bond issues and save money.
• The National Employment Law Project warns that if Congress doesn’t renew extended unemployment insurance by the end of this year, we risk plunging millions into deeper financial crisis and putting yet another obstacle in the path of economic growth.
• The National Academy of State Health Policy released a paper detailing efforts by state agencies to identify and act on racial and ethnic health disparities.

Numbers of the Week

• 16.43 inches – Amount statewide average precipitation was below normal this water year (October 1-September 30), the 2nd driest year on record for Oklahoma.
• 1,865 – Number of foreclosures in Oklahoma in August, down 5.8 percent from the same month in 2010
• $31,600 – Minimum amount in salary and fringe benefits earned by a first-year Oklahoma public school teacher with a bachelor’s degree, 2011-2012
• 80.3 – Number of primary care physicians per 100,000 people in Oklahoma, compared to 120.5 nationally.  Oklahoma ranked 49th in availability of primary care physicians, 2010
• 29 percent – Percentage of Oklahoma’s K-12 children who are on their own after school, 2009

This post is the third in a three-part series on “Oklahoma’s Unemployment Gap,” examining the persistence of racial disparities in unemployment. Part One introduced the unemployment gap and presents preliminary descriptive data on state labor market trends by race. Part Two explores underlying and immediate causes for the state’s black-white unemployment gap and suggests reasons for its persistence. Part Three evaluates solutions for addressing and closing the gap.

The first two posts in this series established the existence of a nation-wide, decades-old disparity in the unemployment rate between black and white workers. Black Oklahomans were unemployed at more than twice the rate (13.1 percent) of their white counterparts (5.9 percent) in 2010. The unemployment rate among black men is exceptionally high, about two and half times higher in Oklahoma.  While the reasons for the disparity are numerous, our last post focused on two explanations around which evidence seems to converge:  the high incarceration rate among blacks and discrimination in the hiring process.  This post explores solutions for closing the unemployment gap in Oklahoma, with an emphasis on reducing incarceration rates and strategies for preserving equal opportunity employment. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing high unemployment rates, weak economic growth, and stock market volatility are all contributing to concern and uncertainty about the national economy. But how’s Oklahoma faring in these turbulent times? I recently spoke with Chad Wilkerson, the Oklahoma City Branch Executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City about conditions in the Sooner State. This is an edited and abridged transcript of our conversation on August 24, 2011.

David Blatt: How would you characterize the current state of Oklahoma’s economy?

Chad Wilkerson: I would say things are still pretty solid for us. We’ve had fairly solid job growth over the past year. Unemployment’s down to 5.5 percent, and in some parts of the state… it’s less than 5 percent.

However, I think that measure may be overstating the degree to which we’ve recovered from the recent recession. There’s been a fairly sizable number of people drop out of the labor force in the last couple of years. This has been interesting me of late because of the fact that Oklahoma’s unemployment rates are down to a level that many economists consider full employment levels, 5 – 6 percent. But if the same share of the adult population was looking for jobs today as in 2007, our unemployment rate for the state would be a little over 8 percent. That’s probably too high because I think the share of the population that was looking for jobs in 2007 was also a bit abnormal – the boom was going on, perhaps too many people were looking for jobs from a productivity standpoint. So our actual unemployment is probably somewhere between 5 and 8 percent. We’re probably not quite fully recovered, but we’re still doing much better than the nation. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s up this week at Oklahoma Policy Institute? The Weekly Wonk is dedicated to this week’s events, publications, and blog posts.

This week at OK Policy, we posted the second blog in a three-part series on “Oklahoma’s Unemployment Gap,” examining the persistence of racial disparities in unemployment.  Oklahoma’s Unemployment Gap (Part Two): Why the labor market isn’t colorblind, explores the causes for the state’s black-white unemployment gap and suggests reasons for its persistence.  We alerted you to an upcoming event next week – UCO will host a lecture by Andrew Ross Sorkin on August 31st, New York Times journalist and author of the book, “Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System – and Themselves.” Read the rest of this entry »

This post is the second in a three-part series on “Oklahoma’s Unemployment Gap,” examining the persistence of racial disparities in unemployment.  Part One introduced the unemployment gap and presents preliminary descriptive data on state labor market trends by race.  Part Two explores underlying and immediate causes for the state’s black-white unemployment gap and suggests reasons for its persistence.  Part Three will evaluate solutions for addressing and closing the gap.

Part One of this series examined the stubborn persistence of the unemployment gap between black and white workers.  Despite decades of improvement in social, political, and economic status, black Americans are still unemployed at twice the rate of their white counterparts, a ratio that hasn’t changed since the 1940s.  Why aren’t black workers achieving employment parity?  Researchers point to two factors: (1) the high incarceration rate among blacks, especially black men; and (2) discrimination in the hiring process. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s up this week at Oklahoma Policy Institute? The Weekly Wonk is dedicated to this week’s events, publications, and blog posts.

This week at OK Policy, we reported on the first meeting of a legislative task force to evaluate state tax credits and economic incentives.  The meeting made clear that it will be a long and sometimes contentious process, but that this Task Force is serious about meeting the challenge.  We blogged on Wednesday about how the recent FAA shutdown proves business taxes aren’t always passed on to consumers. Read the rest of this entry »

The national unemployment rate rose for the second consecutive month in May, edging up to 9.1 percent. Fortunately for Oklahoma, the unemployment rate is moving in the opposite direction, dropping for a fifth consecutive month in April to 5.6 percent, giving us the 6^th lowest unemployment rate in the nation.  While this is good news for the state, inconsistent job growth locally and nationally suggest that the road to labor market recovery will continue to be rocky.  While any encouraging news is worth celebrating, we need to look beyond this standard indicator to better gauge the overall health of Oklahoma’s labor market.

The unemployment rate as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is an imperfect measure of unemployment, especially in the aftermath of a protracted economic downturn.  The widely reported unemployment rate only counts people who “made specific efforts to find employment” in the last month.  If you are unemployed but don’t meet that criteria, you are not considered part of the labor force.  This method discounts unemployed Oklahomans who had no specific leads on a job, didn’t make any effort to find a job, or have given up looking for work indefinitely.  The BLS describes the distinction this way:

Persons who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force. This category includes retired persons, students, those taking care of children or other family members, and others who are neither working nor seeking work. Read the rest of this entry »

This week, OK Policy put out the latest edition of Numbers You Need, our monthly bulletin of key economic and budget indicators for the state. Our main headline was of an economic recovery stuck in neutral. While there are certain encouraging signs of the state emerging from out of the Great Recession, the downturn is continuing to hit segments of the population hard. High levels of distress can be seen, for example, in record numbers of home foreclosures and continued growth in food stamp and Medicaid caseloads. But it is the persistence of high rates of unemployment and slow job growth that provide the strongest and most worrisome indicator of the distances still needed to be traveled to a solid, broad-based recovery.

Oklahoma’s unemployment rate hit 6.8 percent in June, rising one-tenth of one percent for the second straight month and falling just short of the highest rate registered during this recession (6.9 percent from August to October 2009). Oklahoma’s unemployment in June remained well below the national rate of 9.5 percent and was 8th lowest among the states.  However, over the past six months, the national unemployment rate has dropped 0.5 percentage points, while Oklahoma’s rate has remained unchanged.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our October edition of Numbers You Need is now out, providing a snapshot of economic and budget trends in Oklahoma through monthly data on jobs, inflation, public benefits, and state revenues, as well as the most recent quarterly data on building permits and an annual update on the poverty rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out Slate.com’s animated map of the changing job picture over the last three and a half years. If you scroll down to the map and click the green arrow at the lower right, you can watch the job picture change for individual counties on a month-by-month basis. Counties are blue when they’ve gained jobs over the most recent year and red if they’ve lost them. The red circles spreading across the country are pretty dramatic evidence of how deep and broad this recession has been and continues to be. While we should avoid being smug at a time like this, we think most Oklahomans, regardless of their political leanings, will be pleased and grateful to see that we are one of the very few states that look more blue than red.

The Oklahoman recently ran an editorial calling attention to the especially heavy toll that the current recession is having on male workers nationally and here in Oklahoma. A new issue brief from Economic Policy Institute, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Current Population Survey, provides some startling state-level data that bears out this point.

In the 4th quarter of 2007, which marked the onset of the national recession, Oklahoma’s unemployment rate was 3.4 percent for men and 4.2 percent for women. In the just-completed 2nd quarter of 2009, while the female unemployment rate had inched up a mere 0.2 percentage points to 4.6 percent, the male unemployment rate had soared 4.2 percentage points to 7.6 percent. Thus,  over a span of eighteen months, the job market switched from one where women were somewhat likelier than men to be unemployed to one where the male unemployment rate is a full three percentage points higher than that of women.

Oklahoma’s gender profile mirrors the national picture but in somewhat more extreme form.  Nationally, unemployment rates for females at the start of the recession were 0.2 percentage points higher than for males (4.9 percent compared to 4.7 percent), a smaller gender gap than in Oklahoma. Today, the male unemployment rate for men nationally is 3 percentage points higher for men than for women (10.7 percent compared to 7.7 percent), the same size gap as in Oklahoma.

The Oklahoman’s explanation for what has happened is persuasive and is echoed by others who have reported on the subject :

The recession is hitting hardest on sectors over which men have traditionally dominated — construction, heavy manufacturing, mining, etc. — and hitting the lightest on sectors where women have traditionally ruled — education, health care, government service.

Looking ahead, the gender gap is expected to worsen as unemployment levels remain high over the next year. EPI’s report includes projections for the 2nd quarter of 2010, when economic forecasters expect unemployment to peak. They predict Oklahoma’s unemployment rate will rise to 7.3 percent for all workers; for men, unemployment is projected to be 9.0 percent (a 1.2 percentage point increase from 2009), compared to 5.3 percent for women (a 0.7 percentage point increase from 2009).

EPI’s report also shows that ethnic minorities – African Americans and Hispanics – are being hurt worse than Whites during the downturn and that these disparities will also worsen over the next year. Due to inadequate sample sizes, EPI was unable to provide estimates of unemployment rates by ethnicity for Oklahoma.

The loss of male jobs during this downturn is likely to have far-reaching consequences for the economy, communities, and families that will take a long time to fully understand and address. Will we see  more men move into traditionally female occupations in the education and health care sectors? Will we see shifts in family formation and child-rearing roles if more women become the primary breadwinners? Let’s hope that policymakers start soon to think about these questions and begin to think about crafting solutions to ensure that the economy that emerges out of this downturn is one that provides opportunities for all.