2014 jobs forecast: Go West, young person (if you dare to live in Arizona)

It’s 2014, so you’d like to get off your friend’s couch and actually live at your own place. But that means getting a job, and those are still not popping up everywhere like weeds. Where are all of the jobs going? Apparently they’re drifting westward (farther than the Lower East Side even), or at least that’s what the 2014 forecast is. And you might scoff, but remember how correct the weather forecasts have been so far this year.

The folks at ProPublica put together a map based on Moody Analytic’s economic forecast this year, and found that New York ranks 47th in projected job growth, with just 1.12 percent growth on the horizon. Of course, we don’t know if Moody’s counted jobs like cleaning the blood out of the streets after the revolution as jobs or not.

That being said, don’t pack your meager belonging in a bag just yet, because the top three states for projected job growth may not be where a liberal, bearded, New York-dweller would want to go. Nebraska, Arizona and Texas lead the way in projected job growth in Moody’s, and projected boredom and misery while we’re there in a study we just did really quickly. You can read up on what Nebraska’s job-heavy boomtowns are like in this piece here by Susan Elizabeth Shepard.

Not all is lost though: Colorado, which recently legalized pot sales, is sitting pretty at number four in the jobs forecast, with a prediction of 2.67 percent job growth for 2014. Makes sense to us, what with the state opening its doors to what was a thriving underground economy previously. Colorado doesn’t seem like such a bad place to wind up, aside from the occasional local secession threat, but we’re gonna stick it out here. There’s no WFAN or WNYC in all those other states, and who can live without them?