In case it isn't clear, I'm from Pittsburgh. And I'm old enough to remember when the steel mills breathed fire 24 hours a day.
Now I spend my time making charts and deconstructing stock market and economic data, especially the jobs numbers. Pittsburgh has managed to partially survive the loss of the steel industry through the beneficence of the Carnegies and Mellons who set up CMU, Pitt, the Carnegie Museum and library system, and by extension UPMC. So there are many people who are gainfully employed in the city. But the steels jobs are gone, and that's a big deal.
Here's why. Based on the statistics I'm looking at only around 35% of the adult population in the US has a college degree. That means the 65% who never wasted their parents' money at college make up a huge portion of our society. These are the people who used to make a good living at the steel mill that's now in Shenzhen. These are the people who built the malls the well-paid factory workers' wives would shop at. So the largest group of people in the nation doesn't have nearly the economic prospects it once did because the good paying jobs that require excellent technical skills but not a college degree have been shipped overseas thanks to the altruistic ownership of Corporate America.
When you print the unemployment rate of high school graduates with no college degree along with the total number of manufacturing employees, guess what - they have a strong correlation. The inverse no college UNRATE is turning down (and diverging negatively from the "improving" reported unemployment rate). And since the number of manufacturing employees shows no signs of life don't expect the HS no college UNRATE to start magically improving like the service (waitress) oriented headline number did in the last quarter
