In the News
From the Director:
For the Love of Numbers
I think that I became an economist because I love data and numbers. They speak to me in a way that they don't to others. They can tell the truth, part of the truth and sometimes even tell downright lies. But they aways are interesting when you're willing to look deeper into them.
For instance, the ES202 data on jobs for the Second Quarter of 2009, some six months ago, was released recently. This data lags significantly, but the end of June 2009 was well into the recession, perhaps near the bottom of the recession according to some. The data shouted to me that between the 2nd Quarters of 2007 and 2009 Arlington gained 5,274 jobs. These are real jobs covered by unemployment compensation. So, as the rest of Northern Virginia lost jobs, Fairfax County lost 14,253 jobs during this period, Arlington was growing. To be fair, Arlington was not the only community that saw an increase; Loudoun County grew by 435 jobs.
Not only did Arlington see increases in employment, but the average weekly wage (AWW) increased by 5.3 percent to an annual equivalent of $74,000. Arlington had the highest AWW at the beginning of the period and it grew through the recession. True, other communities saw slightly greater increases, but it does give pause when the greatest recession since the 1930s actually results in job and wage growth. Talk about a counter-cyclical economy!
Another data table caught my eye in an even stranger way. The Associated Press reported in mid-January that Arlington was among the nation’s 20 least economically stressed counties, ranking 12th. What struck me was that 17 of the 20 were rural counties in the Dakotas, Kansas, Minnesota or Nebraska! Not a single other east or west coast community was among the least stressed. This was not a set of communities that I had even seen Arlington grouped with before – on any set of measures. The principal measures of economic stress were the unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy rates. Numbers, like politics, can make for some strange bedfellows.
Sometimes numbers shout, and sometimes they whisper, but no matter what level of attention they garner, to me they nearly always tell an interesting story.
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