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- InsightsWorkforce & Skills
The states most crowded with construction workers are mostly drilling and mining
Ranked by construction and extraction jobs per thousand, the top of the table is Wyoming, North Dakota, New Mexico and Alaska. Their own occupational detail shows what is doing the work in that ranking, and it is not building.
- PerspectivesInfrastructure
Shovel-ready is a wage question before it is a permitting one
Texas and California employ almost exactly the same number of construction and extraction workers. The median wage in one is 49,170 dollars and in the other 71,670. A national cost per mile that ignores that is not a cost estimate.
- CommentaryIndustrial Policy
Industrial policy is being judged by the wrong labour number
The unemployment rate says how many job-seekers found work. It says nothing about how many people are looking. For a programme meant to draw people back into work, that is the only question that matters.
- InsightsWorkforce & Skills
The fall in unemployment was finished by 2022, and the rate has risen since
The rate dropped from 8.1 percent in 2020 to 3.7 in 2022, reached a low of 3.6 in 2023, and has risen in both readings since, to 4.3.
- InsightsEconomic Security
American payrolls keep growing, and each year adds less than the one before
Total nonfarm payrolls rose in every annual reading from 2020 to 2025. The size of the rise has fallen three years running, from 6.2 million jobs to 700,000.
- ExplainerInfrastructure
What a cost overrun is measured against
An overrun is a comparison, and the figure it is compared with usually goes unstated. By the end you will know which baselines are in use, and why the same project can be on budget and over budget at once.