During the past decade, it has created 22.3 million new jobs, or an average of 184,000 per month, well above the 100,000 or so necessary to keep up with the natural growth of the labor force, according to the Federal Reserve.But an important caveat to this success story is the geographic inequality of the distribution of these jobs, one that is well illustrated by a Monday analysis by Ben Breitholtz, data scientist at Arbor Research.
“These data show that we’ve had a huge bowing out in job seeking post financial crisis,” he told MarketWatch. “The more you’re in a tech-heavy metro, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Dulles or San Francicso, job seekers are met with recruiters. But you can see that in a lot of smaller cities and towns, there’s a lot of slack in the labor market.”
Breitholtz said that this geographic unequal distribution of jobs is helping to keep wage growth tame, even as the national unemployment rate has remained at historic lows. He found that historically, periods with a significant variance of job matching between metropolitan areas have correlated with weaker wage growth.
mrtgr Guess why? Their leaders are Republicans