68 months after the white jobless rate peaked, the black rate finally dropped to that level

By Philip Bump

Washington Post

June 2, 2017

Source:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/06/02/68-months-after-the-white-jobless-rate-peaked-the-black-rate-finally-dropped-to-that-level/?utm_term=.8ad759fe0e38

A tweet flitted past at some point after the May 2017 jobs report was released on Friday that prompted me to wonder something: How did unemployment compare in recession months to months that the country wasn’t in recession?

I pulled data from the Federal Reserve, and plotted out the percentage of months that white Americans spent at certain unemployment rates. In other words, if whites were at 10 percent unemployment through September and then the rate fell to 5 percent, 75 percent of the months of that year, whites would have been at 10 percent unemployment.

In non-recession months, the distribution for white Americans looks like this.

The median unemployment rate — the rate at which half of the months saw higher unemployment and half lower — was 5 percent.

When we look at recession months, the difference is subtle. The median jumps to 5.4 percent, but otherwise, the distribution isn’t that different.

In part, this is because unemployment rates continue to rise even after recessions end. The peak of white unemployment in the most recent recession came in October 2009, when the rate hit 9.2 percent. The recession was over by July of that year.

Now  the  reveal. I was, in part, wondering how white unemployment in recession months compared to unemployment in non-recession months. But I also wanted to compare white unemployment in recession months to black unemployment in non-recession months. Were white Americans more likely to be employed when the economy was in a doldrums than were black Americans when it was robust?

Well, yes.

Note that the bar at far right is just anything at 15 percent and higher. This is for all months, mind you, because it doesn’t matter. Of the 91 months since white unemployment hit that peak of 9.2 percent, black unemployment has been over 9.2 percent in 70 of them. It took more than five-and-a-half years after November 2009 for black unemployment to finally fall to a point where it was lower than white unemployment was at its peak.

In May, the black unemployment rate was 7.5 percent, one of two months since January 2009 that black unemployment has been lower than the overall unemployment rate that first month of President Barack Obama’s first term. At no point since has black unemployment been lower than white unemployment was that month.

 Top of FormMore important, of the 545 months that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked black unemployment, in 451 of them — 82.8 percent — black unemployment has been higher than the 9.2-percent peak whites hit during the recession.

 What’s more, in three-quarters of the months since 1972, black unemployment has been higher than white unemployment has ever been, stretching back to 1954. (That peak is 9.7 percent.) That’s when records begin; it’s safe to assume that black unemployment during and before the 1940s was not significantly better relative to white unemployment.

In slightly more of those months since 1972 (77.8 percent in total), the black unemployment rate has been at least twice that of whites. After a run of 10 months, black unemployment was again twice that of whites for the past three months.

Since 1972, black unemployment has never been less than 66 percent higher.