THE AVENUE APRIL 5, 2011
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Last week, a Bloomberg News story claimed that Ward 8 in the District of Columbia has the highest unemployment rate in the country.
This is simply not true.
For one thing, comparing small portions of a single city to entire metropolitan areas (as the article does) is unfair.
For another, the official unemployment numbers for individual wards in the city are based on outdated information. The unemployment rate is a vitally important statistic for measuring the economic health of an area, and residents deserve to have data accurately reflect their needs to policymakers. I’ve created a more accurate alternative measure of ward-level unemployment in D.C. over at the District’s Dime, a blog published by the budget watchers at D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, a member of the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative.
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