State Government Employees by Function

State governments employ millions of people in a variety of roles. 

The U.S. Census has data on state and local government employment.  I used the 2007 State Government data to compile the information here.  In 2007 state governments had 4,306,623 full time equivalent (FTE) employees.   FTE employees is a combination of full time and part time. 

 Here is the list of the full time equivalent employees by function for all states combined :

	Full-time equivalent Employment
Financial Administration	172,684
Other Government Administration	56,382
Judicial and Legal	173,021
Police Protection Total	106,595
--Police Officers Only	67,159
--Other Police Employees	39,436
Corrections	470,464
Highways	236,758
Air Transportation	3,330
Water Transport and Terminals	4,968
Public Welfare	235,305
Health	183,275
Hospitals	417,113
Social Insurance Administration	79,165
Solid Waste Management	1,928
Sewerage	1,748
Parks and Recreation	34,768
Natural Resources	145,114
Water Supply	704
Electric Power	4,040
Transit	33,079
Education Total	1,740,222
Elementary & Secondary Education Total	52,143
--Elem & Sec Instructional	39,139
--Elem & Sec Other	13,004
Higher Education Total	1,596,652
--Higher Ed Instructional	522,198
--Higher Ed Other	1,074,454
Other Education	91,427
Libraries	601
State Liquor Stores	7,813
All Other and Unallocable	197,546

Here's how the major functional groups look as far as percent of total employment :

You can see that higher education and education in general is the largest segment of state government employment.   The next largest area of employment is corrections (prisons/jails) and then the third highest is hospitals.

Best of Blog Posts for week of June 24th

Creditcards.com shares 5 money 'rules' meant to be broken

CNNMoney has Confessions of Extreme Penny Pinchers

Bargaineeringlists the Single Letter Stock Tickers

GetRichSlowly asks Hourly vs. Salary: Which is Better?

Do American Women Buy 52 Items of Clothing a Year?

In a recent article on Get Rich Slowly the author stated "The average American woman now buys more than 52 items of new clothing each year".   The number seemed crazy high.   I figured it was numerical fiction.   I decided to go about proving it wrong but ended up proving it right instead.

The figure 52 items of new clothing came from Juliet Schor,   In her paper Cleaning the Closet: toward a new fashion ethic she says on page 9 that : "In  2000 alone the US imported  12.65 billion pieces of apparel, narrowly defined (i.e., not including hats, scarves, etc.). It  produced  another  5.3  billion  domestically.  That’s  roughly  47.7  pieces  per  person  per year. (Women and girls’ rates are higher; men and boys’ lower.)"

U.S. Clothing and Textile Trade with China and the World
In 2005 we imported $80B in clothing and exported $5B.  29.1% from China in 2006.

American Apparel and Footwear has some figures on clothing imports.   In 2009 we imported about 21B square meter equivalents of apparel at a cost of about $63.1B.

The report Textile and Apparel Imports from China: Statistical Reports from the United States International Trade Commission has counts of the number of individual items imported from China as well as the percent of imports that come from China.    Table 3. in the document gives "Quantity of U.S. imports from China by category, for indicated units, 2003–09"   Then in Table 4 we can get the "Quantity of U.S. imports from China as a share of total U.S. imports by category (percent),"    If you combine these two figures you can get the total quantity of items that the U.S. imports worldwide for each category.

Here are major clothing item categories numbers from Table 3 and the % of total imports from Table 4.   THe far right column is the total number of imports worldwide.

	#	% tot	tot
Hosiery, including baby socks: cotton, wool, and MMF	116	39%	297
M&B cotton knit shirts, and W&G cotton knit shirts & blouses	53	14%	379
M&B cotton trousers, breeches & shorts, and W&G cotton trousers, slacks & shorts	47	26%	181
Underwear, cotton & MMF	34	15%	227
M&B MMF knit shirts, and W&G MMF knit shirts & blouses	19	24%	79
Sweaters: Cotton, M&B MMF, and W&G MMF	10	77%	13
Brassieres & other body supporting garments, cotton & MMF	25	56%	45
M&B MMF trousers, breeches & shorts, and W&G MMF trousers, breeches & shorts	11	22%	50
M&B not knit shirts, cotton and MMF	9	28%	32
Trousers, breeches & shorts, silk and veg	6	82%	7

The total numbers are in millions of dozens.   If you sum up the totals you get 1,310 dozen million or 15,716 million.    Thats 15.7 billion items of clothing we import annually.    Divided by approximately 300 million people in the U.S. and that gives us a total of 52 items per capital.

How Many Ads Are We Exposed to Daily??

The other day on a blog article I saw a commenter who said that they had heard that Americans are exposed to 5,000 advertising messages in an average day.    That sounded like an example of numerical fiction.   The number didn't seem close to realistic.   I figured I would do a little research into it and see where these numbers come from.

This Google Answer has a lot of research on the topic.   They cite many references that give numbers for how many ads we see daily.   One such example : “The average American is exposed to 247 commercial messages each day.” Consumer Reports Website

But the numbers just go up from there.   The various sources they reference give numbers of :
247, 600, 3000, 850, 3000, 3000, 600, 500-1000, 2500, 1500, 3000, 3000, 1600, 3000, 3000 and 1500 respectively

Couple points, first, thats a whole lot of variation and second the 3000 number is repeated many times.   I searched further on my own for that 3000 number.   I found the article Children, Adolescents, and Advertising from the American Academy of Pediatrics that says: "The average young person views more than 3000 ads per day on television (TV), on the Internet, on billboards, and in magazines" and it gives the source as : Goodman E. Ads pollute most everything in sight. Albuquerque Journal. June 27, 1999:C3

The Story of Stuff also references the same statistic from the same source according to Wikipedia.   As far as I can tell the 3000 figure comes from Ellen Goodman  I suspect she did some study that claimed that number and then it was cited and repeated across the other sources as fact.   I don't find anything directly from her that explains the figure.   In fact I don't see an explanation behind any of the numbers.

My Guess at a Number

In a given 24 hour period you do a lot of things that have no exposure to advertisements.  You need to eat meals, shower, sleep, dress yourself, etc.  You probably spend a good 10 hours doing such activities.    In a given workday you will also spend 8-10 hours at work and commuting.  

Lets say I browse the web for 2 hours.   Thats 120 minutes of web surfing.   If I spend about 1 minute per page and visit about 120 pages.   If I see 2 ads per page that would be a total of 240 ads in a 2 hour period. If I watch TV for an hour then about 22 minutes of the hour will be advertisements.  In a given minute you generally get 1-2 commercials.   That will result in seeing about 44 commercials in an hour of TV watching.   Watching 5 hours of TV would give you 220 commercials.  If I spend 7 hours on the internet and watching TV then that still only adds up to around 460 advertisements.  You can of course also see advertisements in other places like reading a newspaper, reading magazines, listening to the radio, or seeing ads on billboards and the sides of buses.  

If you add it all up then I think that a figure closer to 250- 500 is realistic.

Now that is just my opinion based on my very quick guess.   However I think it is a lot more realistic than a figure like 3,000 or 5,000. 

Why the 3000 or 5000 figures are exaggerated

OK lets think about this.  Theres 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute.   That gives us 86,400 seconds in a given day.   If you're exposed to 5,000 ads a day then that means on average you see an ad every 17.28 seconds for every single second of the day.   If we assume you aren't exposed to ads while you sleep 8 hours then that makes it even worse at 11.52 seconds per ad on average.   Even if you're watching a pretty heavy barrage of commercial TV you only get about 1 ad per minute.   Worst case if you did nothing but watch TV all day you'd see only around 700 ads.