Unemployment and Poverty in the US: Visualization and data (by the US census bureau, not me)

At the moment I had to postpone my 1000 genomes project I have been doing the majority of my blogs on. I am trying to get set up with a computer over in the computer science department that has Linux so I can run the bioinformatics software that connects me directly to my computing cluster on AWS with my genomic data set. In order to stay up to date with my blog, I thought I would share an interesting visualization I came by while browsing for interesting data visualizations from other people/groups.

Feeling slightly cynical today, I thought I would make this post on a data visualization of the economic degradation of the US from the years 2007 to 2011. Or at least, show evidence suggesting that the US economy is still in a state of declining economic strength. The data for this visualization was gathered by the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) program of the bureau of labor statistics.

http://www.census.gov/did/www/saipe/data/visualization/?reload

If you click the link above, it will take you to the visualization. The visualization makes it readily apparent that between the years of 2008 and 2009 there was a significant growth in poverty and unemployment in the US. I’m pretty sure we all know that was due to the housing bubble burst.

This next link is an interesting application I found on the sheet where you can look at more exact figures regarding the numbers in the visualization, for example, the poverty percentage in Alabama was the 6^th highest in the nation.

http://www.census.gov/did/www/saipe/data/interactive/#

This last link has some datasets on poverty rates in the US for the years 1989 through 2011 ( it does skip a couple years) if you are interested in doing some of your own research. 

http://www.census.gov/did/www/saipe/data/statecounty/data/2011.html

My favorite explanation of the housing burst was done by Peter Schiff, a well-known financial commentator who can be seen from time to time on national news. Though I find his opinions often to be somewhat on the side of “doom and gloom”, you could say he is being realistic and I think makes some very logical points. Please check out this lecture he did if you are interested to hear a very different rendition on the cause of the housing bubble.