Go to and find the data on the unemployment rate. Then, select a period of 20 years – any 20 years that you want. Get FRED to display the graph of the unemployment rate for those 20 years, and attach a copy of that graph to your post here. There are several ways to do this. You can take a screenshot of it in your browser and attach the screenshot here, you can download the data as an excel spreadsheet and make a graph in excel and attach that graph here, you can download the graph as an image from FRED and attach that image here, etc. Any method is fine.
Next, go to FRED and find the data on the unemployment rate for a certain category of people in the United States. FRED has breakdowns of unemployment for all sorts of categories. Here are some examples that you can choose from: , , , , , , , , , etc.
Pick one of the above, or another data set of your choice showing unemployment for some category of people (for example, FRED has many states available, not just Michigan). Then, select the same period of 20 years that you picked for overall unemployment. Get FRED to display the graph for those 20 years, and attach a copy of that graph to your post here.
Now you should have two graphs – one showing overall unemployment, another showing unemployment for a certain category of people. That second graph will be different from the first in some way. Maybe the category of people that you picked tends to have higher unemployment than the overall average, or lower unemployment than average, or some other difference.
Write a post pointing out one or several differences between your two graphs, and speculate on what might be causing those differences. Why is unemployment for X type of people higher, or lower, or otherwise different from the average in the United States?
You don’t have to answer this question correctly (often the answer is still a matter of debate among economists), you only have to offer a plausible, reasonable guess.