You can learn a lot about America by asking what people do for a living in different places. For example, guess the metropolitan area in the United States where bartenders are most concentrated. Ocean City, NJ What about dentists? Lake Havasu City-Kingman, Arizona Economists? The greater Washington area.
I extracted these tidbits and more by sifting through “location quotient” data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The latest annual batch, based on May 2021 data, was released on March 31 as part of the bureau’s employment and payroll statistics. This is the first year the bureau has used its new Occupational Classification System (2018), which includes nearly 800 detailed occupations, from electricians to fishery and game wardens.
Some of the findings are unsurprising (political scientists are most on the ground in Washington and petroleum engineers in Midland, Texas), but some are disconcerting. Why are fundraisers disproportionately most common in Corvallis, Oregon? Why conservatives in Wilmington, North Carolina? Why zoologists and wildlife biologists in Fairbanks, Alaska?
I sifted through 38,000 rows in the office Excel spreadsheet for the states and 147,000 rows for the metropolitan area spreadsheet to find anything of interest. I have produced four tables below to display my findings. If you can explain some of the weirder details, such as the disproportionate share of shampoos in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, please email me at [email protected]
Below is the first table. It shows, for each US state and territory, which occupation has the highest location quotient – in other words, which occupation is disproportionately the most popular.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines location quotient as “the ratio of the employment share of an occupation in a given area to the employment share of that occupation in the United States as a whole. For example, an occupation that accounts for 10% of employment in a specific metropolitan area, compared to 2% of employment in the United States, would have a location quotient of 5 for that area. »
This chart is self-explanatory, although if you don’t live in the woods, you might not know that a feller (Idaho) is someone who cuts down trees for a living. Shampoos, as noted above, have the highest location quotient per state in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Cardiologists are second in New Jersey – not shown. (A New Jersey cardiologist giving shampoos would be off the charts.) I expected a gaming profession to be #1 in Nevada, but the real leader is continuous mining machine operators. Game merchants were #2.
This second table turns things around. I picked 48 popular occupations to see in which state or territory each has the highest location quotient. The greater Washington metro area pops up a lot. One of the reasons is that it’s more like a city than a state, so it has a lot of the types of jobs that exist in cities and few that exist outside of them, like agriculture, mining and fishing. (Not to mention that Washington is unusual anyway.)
My third table is like the second except for metropolitan areas. I looked at 48 professions. This is where you learn that Madison, Wisconsin is where web developers are disproportionately more popular. The table also shows that the metropolitan area with the highest proportion of athletes and sports competitors is Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Florida, an area best known for its tanned retirees. Budget analysts are most concentrated in Carson City, Nevada, and fashion designers in the greater Portsmouth, NH area. The latter really surprised me as I was in Portsmouth recently and didn’t see any fashion designers crowding the streets.
The fourth and final table is my tribute to the hometown of The New York Times. I have listed all the professions in the New York metropolis that have a location quotient of 2 or more. (Metropolitan New York includes Long Island, northeastern New Jersey, a county in eastern Pennsylvania, and the northern suburbs of the city.) A location quotient of 2 means that the work is twice as popular in the metropolis of New York than in the United States as a whole. I left the quotients rounded so you can see the spread. I would have expected finance jobs to be much higher, but on reflection, it makes sense that the #1 defining feature of metropolitan New York is the subway.
week number
-20.8
This is the estimated level of the consumer confidence indicator for eurozone countries in May, according to the median forecast of economists polled by FactSet. That would be a slight improvement from 22 in April. The measure has averaged -10.9 since its inception in 2000. The official figure is expected to be released on Friday.
quote of the day
“So whether we can execute a soft landing or not, it may actually depend on factors that we don’t control.”
— Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell in an interview with Marketplace radio, May 12
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