State in Decline, Employment in RI Cities and Towns: Lincoln
With a March 2012 not-seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate of 10.7%, Lincoln is outperforming Rhode Island overall, with its 11.8%.
With regard to trends from the 2000 U.S. Census to the 2010 iteration, Lincoln is almost exactly the average RI municipality among those that the Current has reviewed thus far. The town’s population grew, over the decade, by 1%. Its labor force (employed and looking for work) grew 4.7%, while its total number of employed residents shrank 3.2%.
The line graph below illustrates Lincoln’s employment picture through the ’90s, the dot-com boom and bust, the housing boom, and no Rhode Island’s long recession. Unemployment is represented as the distance between the lines.
Note on the Data
The population data above comes from the U.S. Census conducted every ten years and is therefore generally considered reliable, to the extent that is used as reference for various government programs and voter districting.
The labor force and unemployment data, however, derives from the New England City and Town Areas (NECTAS) segment of the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). A detailed summary of the methodology is not readily available, but in basic terms, it is a model based on and benchmarked to several public surveys. It can be assumed that the sample rate (i.e., the number of people actually surveyed) in each Rhode Island town is very small (averaging roughly 30 people per municipality).
The trends shown, it must be emphasized, are most appropriately seen as trends in the model that generally relate to what’s actually happening among the population but are not an immediate reflection of it. Taking action on the assumption that the exact number of employed or unemployed residents shown corresponds directly to real people in a town would vest much too much confidence in the model’s accuracy.
Be that as it may, the data has been collected and published, and taken a town at a time, it is relatively easy to digest. So, curiosity leads the Current to see it as the best available data to deepen our understanding of trends within Rhode Island. If the findings comport with readers’ sense of how the towns relate to each other, perhaps lessons regarding local and statewide policies may be drawn. If not, then the lesson will be on the limitations of data in our era of information overload.