-- WARNING: High Level of Wonkiness Detected --

One of the posters over on the Urban Planet boards posted this link to a map that shows per capita job listings for the top 50 metros in the US. The map is published by the job listing aggregation service Indeed.com, and it ranks Providence as 36th out of 50 or in the 28th percentile. Not great.

It's one of several recent lists that have come out. For some reason, Providence and Rhode Island have been ranking either very high or very low in these lists. I had been wondering why until I heard something from Ken Payne that opened my wonky eyes. (More on that later.)

First, I want to take a closer look at that map to see how accurate it is for our specific metro. Click the link - it will open in a separate tab/window for easy reference. 

The source (not specified) is Indeed's own listings that aggregate postings on company career pages and major boards. They have some filters to eliminate duplicates, but as this shows , this is really two jobs listed as four jobs. So the degree of overlap could play a significant role. Places that have offices of major employers that aggressively post on multiple boards as well as their own website will have some increase in representation.

Also, they don't define how they calculate what a 'metro' is. Lets assume it's "metropolitan statistical areas" or MSAs. An MSA is not, IMO, a good proxy for economic development area. It's too small. I grew up in a town that's part of the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk MSA, but everybody worked in NYC. While that MSA has more in-market workers now, the Metro North trains are packed taking workers to the city. Economic development is more regional than local.

Finally, because the state boundaries put a good part of our metro in another state, all the jobs in the Attleboros, etc. probably aren't counted. It really depends on how they parse their listings. The odds are good that the population figure is based on the MSA, which includes Fall River, etc, but the jobs number is RI-only. 

I guess that's a long way of saying that you have to take any given statistical output in its proper context.

Lies, er, Statistics About Rhode Island

I was at the People's Power and Light annual meeting last month, and Ken Payne (who is wikkit smaat, BTW) spoke a bit about why Rhode Island has the nation's lowest per capita energy use. It's certainly not because of any program by the state to reduce energy use. It's actually quite simple, entirely due to our small size, and not all that great an indicator for us.

Three factors have come together to create our statistic. First, we are very small, so small changes make a big difference for us statistically. Second, we are on the ocean and even have the bay in the center of the state. This strongly moderates the ambient temperature, so we're usually a few degrees warmer than, say, Worcester in the winter and a few degrees cooler in the summer. The take away is that our heating/cooling demand is, per capita, lower than our larger neighbors who have land far from the coast.

The last factor - and it's the "not good" part - is that our industrial demand is very, very low. Industrial demand can be a huge part of a region's energy demand, and ours has dropped as factories close down. Replacing industrial demand in a factory with residential demand in a converted factory is not even close to even.

The take-away isn't that statistics can be misleading. It's that RHODE ISLAND statistics are more misleading than others because our small size makes us statistically unstable.

Now as to that study that shows we're psychologically unstable ... DUH!

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