Unemployment Rate, LIke Real Estate And Politics, Is Local -- March 3, 2017

A reader suggested comparing the unemployment rates of New York state and Pennsylvania and tying the data with fracking.

This is how I did it:

FRED MSA: NYC-NJ-PA -- unemployment rate of 4.1% currently and often (and recently) as high as 9+ percent.

Then I googled unemployment rates for western Pennsylvania and upstate New York. This was the first hit:

The Economic Effects of Hydrofracturing On Local Economies, from "research" center for the state of New York, dated May 6, 2013. The findings of their study:

• Pennsylvania counties with hydrofractured gas wells have performed better across economic indicators than those that have no wells.
• The more wells a county contains, the better it performed.
• Between 2007 and 2011, per-capita income rose by 19 percent in Pennsylvania counties with more than 200 wells, by 14 percent in counties with between 20 and 200 wells, and by 12 percent in counties with fewer than 20 wells. 
• In counties without any hydrofractured wells, income went up by only 8 percent. 
• Counties with the lowest per-capita incomes experienced the most rapid growth. 
• Counties with more than 200 wells added jobs at a 7 percent annual rate over the same time period. 
• Where there was no drilling, or only a few wells, the number of county jobs shrank by 3 percent. 
• Using the Pennsylvania data to project hydrofracking’s effect on New York counties, we find that the income of residents in the 28 New York counties above the Marcellus Shale has the potential to expand by 15 percent or more over the next four years—if the state’s moratorium is lifted. 
• Our data also suggest that had New York allowed its counties to fully exploit the Marcellus Shale, those counties would have seen income-growth rates of up to 15 percent for a given four-year period, or as much as 6 percent more than they are experiencing. 

The governor apparently never got the memo.

Some counties in upstate New York state are considering "seceding" from New York and "becoming part" of Pennsylvania.

Finally, some non-fake news from The New York Times: New York's southern tier is struggling, September 29, 2015:

This town of roughly 5,500 residents looks alarmingly like dozens of other towns and cities in New York’s Southern Tier, a vast part of the state that runs parallel to Pennsylvania. Years ago, the region was a manufacturing powerhouse, a place where firms like General Electric and Westinghouse thrived. But over time companies have downsized, or left altogether, lured abroad or to states with lower taxes and fewer regulations.

The state has pumped tens of millions of dollars of economic aid into the Southern Tier, hoping private-sector money would follow. In 2015, for example, the state’s Southern Tier Regional Economic Development Council awarded $80.8 million to area projects. Still, the state’s commitment to the area, both in dollars and in rhetoric, has lagged other regions. In western New York, for example, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, pledged $1 billion in 2012 to support economic development. Since then, he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into numerous Buffalo-area projects.

The Southern Tier has proved to be a harder fix. It is predominantly rural and lacks a significant population core that typically attracts the private sector.

The region is resource rich, but landowners are angry the government will not let them capitalize on it. Some had pinned their hopes of an economic revival on the prospect of the state’s authorizing hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking; many of them can recite the payment formula gas companies were proposing: $500 a month per acre.

Unemployment rates, like politics, and real estate is local. But I think I get the picture. New Yorkers like Senator Schumer and Andrew Cuomo because they like Hillary.

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Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes

Svante Paabo

c. 2014

DDS: 569.986 PAA

Chapter 8: page 93, an illustration of the tree of humans and great apes. Five end species, or groups, or forms, left to right:

• orangutans, the gorilla, human, bonobo (pygmy chimpanzee), the "common" chimpanzee

• the trunk first splits about 14 million years ago: the orangutan splits off from the rest
• the next branch, the gorilla split off from the common ancestor to the last three about 8 million years ago
• around 4 - 7 million years go, the last common ancestor to the last three (human and two chimps) disappears
• around 4 - 7 million years ago, two branches end in two groups (human and chimps)
• the "super-group" of chimps subsequently separates into two end forms: the bonobo (the pygmy chimpanzee) and the common chimpanzee

From the book, page 94:

There are two species of chimpanzees, both living in Africa. The "common" chimpanzee lives in equatorial forests and savannahs in a patchy distribution stretching from Tanzania in the east to Guinea in the west, while the bonobo, sometimes called the "pygmy chimpanzee," lives only south of the Congo River, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Comparisons of DNA sequences had shown that the two chimpanzee species are the closest living relatives of humans, our lineages having split perhaps some 4 million to 7 million years ago. A bit further back, perhaps 7 million to 8 million years ago, humans and chimpanzees shared an ancestor with the other African great ape, the gorilla. Orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra share with the other great apes and humans an ancestor who lived perhaps 12 million to 14 million years ago.

The branch that ends in "human" does not show any further division in this particular illustration. My hunch is that in time, the thick "human" branch will be seen to break off into three smaller branches: a) humans as we generally know "them" today; b) Neanderthal; and, c) alt-left New Yorkers. The Neanderthals have disappeared, but the other two species are extant. The Ur-alt-left New Yorker was most likely the last common ancestor to Schumer, Hillary, Cuomo, and Bloomberg. The jury is still out with regard to exactly where Anthony Weiner fits in.