the downturnaround

The Downturnaround Is Long Nebraska

The unemployment news is grim โ€” seven states hit double digits in unemployment last month, led by Michigan at 12 percent. But as you know, the Downturnaround likes to take a glass-half-full approach to such harrowing figures. For instance, if you think about it, Michigan is still 88 percent employed.

In examining the state-by-state figures, we were heartened to see that jobs were holding up pretty well in some places. In Nebraska, the unemployment rate actually ticked downward. True, this may be a statistical aberration, but maybe itโ€™s not! It turns out that the middle part of the country, which never experienced much of a boom, is also not experiencing much of a bust โ€” at least not, you know,ย yet.

Anyway, here are the five states with the lowest unemploymentย rates:

Wyoming: 3.9 percent

Nebraska: 4.2 percent

North Dakota: 4.3 percent

South Dakota: 4.6 percent

Iowa: 4.9 percent

The first thing we notice about these states โ€” besides the fact that weโ€™ve never set foot in any of them โ€” is that they have very low per-capita ratios of credit-default-swap traders, publicists, and venues offering bottle service. The geographer Joel Kotkin calls this middle swath of the country โ€œthe zone of sanity,โ€ which the Downturnaround likes the sound of. That said, we wouldnโ€™t want to move to any of these places โ€” hardly anyone does, which is why they have such a hard time attracting new residents (except maybe Wyoming, which has the cowboy thing). Theyโ€™re all the way out there. Still, we can learn something from our friends in the heartland: Out there, the jobs revolve around essential human activities, like, you know, growing food. And although we hope very much that we are not returning to a time when we all have to do that for ourselves again, the Downturnaround believes that economic growth will be restored in this country by refocusing on the basics: what people want and how to provide it to them with quality and value. If a bunch of Midwesterners can create a zone of sanity out there in the middle of nowhere, we should be able to do it here,ย too.

The Downturnaround Is Long Nebraska