Texas employment tops 14M as state job growth tops U.S.

While low unemployment is good, I worry about the quality of employment.<p>For the San Antonio area, 46% of households — more than 240,000 households — can&#x27;t afford the essentials such as housing, child care, food, transportation, health care and a basic smartphone plan.<p>This data from ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. It&#x27;s a stubborn number that hasn&#x27;t budged in over a decade. About half the city really struggles to make ends meet.

Texas has a pretty strong and diversified economy. Lots of oil both in midland&#x2F;Odessa and in the gulf. Energy sector is big in Houston. Decent tech presence in Austin although lots of focus on lower level jobs (phone&#x2F;support&#x2F;etc). Dallas has lots of finance. Manufacturing is big there too, and transportation.<p>One of the things I worried about when I moved out of Texas was leaving such a strong and diversified economy… but after Covid and the normalization of remote work, this is thankfully less of an issue now. I hope remote work is here to stay. It helps prevent the centralization of labor around existing cities and lets the wealth of society spread more uniformly throughout the country.

I recently moved from Austin to Portland voluntarily to retire in a lifestyle less hostile to the people living there. The quality of life in Texas is far from good.

I&#x27;m waiting patiently until the academic studies on COVID response vs. what happens next. Assuming the actual rules got wound back fairly quickly, we&#x27;ve got a really interesting natural experiment on the go into what real medium-term business confidence looks like when governments roll in and shut things down unexpectedly.

How many employees in Texas are illegal? States that want to complain about illegal immigration should mandate E-Verify for all employers. This would force them to be honest about how much businesses profit from illegal labor. But it is easier to keep gullible voters distracted talking about walls.