Ed Glaeser is wondering why unemployment in New York City isn’t higher. Befitting his interest in big picture urban economic issues, he offers some big picture hypotheses that are worth looking at before concluding that he’s not sure. And neither am I. But the question interested me enough that I went to the BLS to see which industries and sectors, specifically, were hurting the most. And made pictures!

Consider this chart of February unemployment rates by Industry classification:

It’s quite clear in which industries the pain is being felt most strongly. Construction, as we’d expect, and agriculture, as we might not. But a look at sectoral unemployment makes explicit the fact that this is primarily a blue collar recession, whatever the pain being inflicted on Wall Street:

So there you have it. Not too hard to understand why New York might be performing fairly well in the unemployment sweepstakes.