This update incorporates the July 2025 jobs report. Here is the latest estimate of the breakeven rate for monthly payrolls, compared with monthly payrolls from recent months. The breakeven rate is considerably below its peak in early 2024 because the immigration surge ended and the population continues to age. The current estimate is likely too [ ]
The recent rise in unemployment is steeper in occupations where remote work is more widespread. A continued rise could shift bargaining power towards employers who want workers to return to the office. Last week Amazon announced that its workers would need to work in person five days a week starting in January. Since tech has [ ]
In its latest projections, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the fastest growth in higher-wage occupations that require more education. Healthcare and tech jobs are projected to grow fastest, while sales and office jobs shrink most. Renewable energy, healthcare, and tech are where the jobs are Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released [ ]
The nation’s most urban counties lost population in 2023 for the fourth year in a row, while lower-density suburbs grew at their fastest pace since the foreclosure crisis, according to the latest Census Bureau population estimates. The three largest metropolitan areas – New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago – all lost population in 2023. The [ ]
Urban counties grew faster than estimated. The big population swings of the 2010s were slightly smaller than estimated. Yesterday the Census Bureau released its detailed population counts from the 2020 Census for redistricting purposes. It s the first time that official 2020 population counts were published for counties and metro areas. For the most part they [ ]
The surge of new cases in October is concentrated in colder, less populated, more Republican-leaning counties. Places that suffered springtime or summer surges have more cases in October, adjusted for other factors. As new COVID19 cases start a third climb in America, the geographic pattern is shifting. The first wave, in the spring, was centered [ ]
New cases of COVID19 are now as prevalent in red counties as in blue counties, for the first time in this pandemic. The geography of new COVID19 cases is shifting toward places that are warmer, younger, have more crowded housing units, and are farther away from New York. The COVID19 pandemic has been much more [ ]
Local differences in COVID19 deaths follow persistent patterns. The strongest predictor of high local death rate is now proximity to New York. Using the New York Times’s published daily counts of COVID19 cases and deaths by county, I’ve been tracking local differences and analyzing the factors correlated with higher death rates. This blogpost was first [ ]
Although the new Jobs Quality Index is falling, more compelling measures of job quality have recently picked up. A few weeks ago, a new index of the US labor market rang alarm bells. The Cornell-CPA US Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI for short) showed job quality today to be lower than in the 1990s [ ]
Yesterday I published a story at FiveThirtyEight showing that Las Vegas is the metro whose demographics today look most like America s projected demographics in 2060. The future of America will look like Las Vegas today, at least on demographics. https://t.co/giNLxPFhIE pic.twitter.com/V90XBsVnoN Jed Kolko (@JedKolko) June 22, 2017 I also tweeted several datapoints and charts [ ]