It’s an exciting but disconcertingly unsettled time here in the hinterlands between the vast and troubled rust belt to our north and west and the bustling problem-plagued metropolis to the south. All eyes are glued to the screen watching the soap opera that national politics, where one person’s narcissistic claptrap is another’s revealed wisdom. What is a poor soul to do?
Our larger urban areas are not far from full employment, the statisticians tell us. The nation’s unemployment rate is 4.7 percent, New York State’s is 4.4 percent.
The unemployment rate in New York City is a small notch lower at 4.3 per cent. Give or take, these numbers, which had been double their present ones for years, are pretty much as low as they can go without causing inflation. The huge metropolitan area labor market seems to keep humming.
By that measure, things aren’t much worse here. Ulster County’s unemployment rate in February was 5.1 percent, three-tenths of a percentage point above that of the Hudson Valley as a whole. Last February Ulster County reported an unemployment rate of 4.8 percent, also three-tenths above that of the Hudson Valley at the time.
Yes, there are still discouraged workers, and a broader definition of total unemployment including them could hike the rate to about nine percent statewide. Much of that continuing malaise comes from structural unemployment, the chronic mismatch between job skills and employment opportunities. But it’s still a signal of social failure.
Unemployed people in many traditional industries, especially upstate, are despairing of ever again earning the wages they once made in the jobs they once held.
According to the research of the Empire Center, the population increase downstate (New York City, Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley) has slowed in the past couple of years, Meanwhile, the population of the rest of the state has been decreasing at a slowly accelerating rate. For the first time in a decade, this census-based research indicates, New York’s statewide population declined in 2015-2016.
The New York Federal Reserve reports that economic activity has picked up in the region at a modest pace. “Manufacturers noted a brisk pickup in business activity in early 2017,” the Fed’s March 1 Beige Book indicated, “while service-sector contacts have continued to report steady to moderately expanding activity. Consumer spending has been subdued in recent weeks, despite a surge in consumer confidence.”
The substantial number of people moving out of New York City continue to be replaced in the big-city labor force by new immigrants with different (and often lesser) skills and by commuters from further away. There doesn’t yet seem much evidence, however, that the people leaving Gotham are sufficiently robust in number to be bringing a boom to our hinterlands. It seems that they’re not even enough of them to replace the number of people who are leaving the Hudson Valley.
Take a look at the results of the presidential election in New York, one of the bluer of the blue states. It’s as good an indicator of political discontent as any.
Donald Trump won the vote in practically all the upstate counties outside the largest central cities. The Hudson Valley counties above Westchester and Rockland were a tossup. Some went blue, others red. Trump won Putnam, Orange, Sullivan and Greene. Hillary Clinton won Ulster, Dutchess (barely) and Columbia.
The many vigorous attempts by state government over the past two or three decades to increase upstate jobs growth have all failed. You can’t tell angry people they shouldn’t be angry. No matter how many times they’ve been told that things will be getting better soon, many if not most upstate people are angrier and more frustrated than ever.
Advances in communications and information technology have allowed organizations to become more geographically dispersed without teammates losing touch with each other. The trend toward decentralization can allow such things as the offshoring of support services and more people working from home. Building on these developments, some commentators have predicted “the death of distance,” where the amount of work time in face-to-face interactions will be substantially diminished. You’d think that this geographic dispersal would work to the advantage of well-educated workers at a greater distance from large cities.
Most of the economic literature, however, has concluded that a large degree of social interaction is vital in organizational life. Productivity is usually higher when teammates are together. But not always. Geographic and social distance “are strategic complements in communication-intensive production settings,” according to a March 2017 paper from the London School of Economics.
Based on this research, I’d like to suggest a conclusion. For some creative industries and technical occupations, bringing people close enough to a large urban center for work purposes but far enough from it for life purposes might constitute the most optimally productive balance.
Wonder where that might be?
Join the family! 
