U.S. Unemployment Rate Viz

I decided to try entering the Tableau Viz contest and since we needed to use a public data set, I was curious about looking at unemployment rates in the United States.

I know the economy has been tough for everyone lately and I wanted to see how unemployment rates stack up by state and for the U.S. as a whole. I pulled data for the last ten years from the U.S. Department of Labor. They have lots of fascinating data to analyze. It was hard to pick which data set to use!

I compared the annual average unemployment rate for the entire United States against state unemployment rates. I included the historical high and historical low unemployment rates to compare against July 2011 unemployment rates by state.

Some highlights:
  • Nevada had the highest unemployment rate (as of July 2011) at 12.9%.
  • California had the second highest unemployment rate at 12%. Not promising for my state! 
  • North Dakota had the lowest unemployment rate at 3.3%. Looks like it's time to move to North Dakota!! 
  • The last two years (2009 and 2010) have seen the highest spike in the U.S. annual average unemployment rate (looking at the last ten years). In 2008, the U.S. was at 5.8% and then jumped to 9.3% in 2009 and then 9.8% in 2010. It remains to be seen what the annual average for 2011 will be, but it doesn't look good so far.
  • Highest historical unemployment rate belonged to West Virginia which had an unemployment rate of 18.1% back in March 1983. Wow!
  • Lowest historical unemployment rate (2.1%) belonged to Connecticut and New Hampshire in Oct 2000 and May 1987 respectively.
In conclusion, things may look bad now, but we're not in the worst state we've ever been. Hopefully the unemployment rate will start to drop in all states.

Play around with the data, compare states against each other and compare them against the U.S. annual average unemployment rate.

Try clicking on the states on the map to filter; hold down Ctrl to select multiple states. This will update the Unemployment Rate Trend by State and the data table.

You can also enter states in the dialog box on the right. Use the sliders to filter states based off the July 2011 rate, historical high, and/or historical low unemployment rates. Then click on the bubbles on the state map to update the Unemployment Rate Trend by State and the data table.

Enjoy!

For a direct link to this viz, go here.

Special thanks to Alex Kerin from Data Driven Consulting for a better U.S. map that includes Hawaii and Alaska - really helped for this data viz!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sports Payrolls

With the economy still in a tough spot, I was curious to see how much money is spent across every major sport in the United States. Being a huge baseball, football, and basketball fan, I really wanted to see who spends the most money on payroll and who is the highest paid player in all sports. Feel free to play around with this visualization. The insights I found were really interesting and it's amazing how much money there is in sports across the United States. We definitely love our sports and we're willing to pay big bucks for entertainment. Hover over the "Information" icon to get more details on how to interact with this visualization. My insights and analysis are below this visualization. <a href="undefined"><img alt=" " src="http://public.tableausoftware.com/static/images/Sp&am
Read more

Destination Data

Image
Having just returned from the 2014 Tableau Conference , I was debating whether or not I should blog about it. I realized I've received so much from the Tableau Community over the years that it would be a shame to not share my thoughts. So, here we go ... TABLEAU CONFERENCE IS BIG! One thought that definitely stuck out was the sheer size of this year's conference! There were 5,500 attendees so it was definitely crowded at times. But it was a reminder of the incredible growth that Tableau has been experiencing and how, so many others have found Tableau to be a tool that not only gets the job done, yet also delights. I like how one person said that Tableau is the closest thing he's found to playing a video game at work . I totally agree! If you're going to attend one data/analytics conference during the year, this is the ONE you want to go to. I was anticipating the first keynote because it always sets the stage for what is to come. Having heard Christian
Read more

Viz Makeover

Image
With the release of Tableau 8 , there are a host of new features including brand-new visualizations. I took one of my old visualizations and revamped it with things you can only do in version 8. Here's a summary of the things I changed from my original U.S. Unemployment Rate Viz: Decided to pull the latest unemployment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (data is up to Feb 2013).  Utilized a treemap to show the Unemployment Rate % by state (from 2000-2012). Treemaps are an effective way to show many slices of information! Tried using the new packed bubbles visualization to display the U.S. annual unemployment rate (avg) from 2000-2012. It's a catchy way to show information although it can be a bit tricky to use since it may or may not be more effective than your standard bar chart. I'll let you decide. :) Floating containers everywhere! Added text to guide the user on how to use the map as a filter, put color legends closer to the visualizations, and pu
Read more