Krugman Compares Pennsylvania's Shale Boom To North Dakota's

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

March 13, 2012 | 1:09 PM

Every liberal’s favorite economist, Paul Krugman, has put together an interesting blog post comparing Pennsylvania’s energy economy to North Dakota’s.
Both states have seen a major uptick in oil and gas drilling jobs, due to advances in hydraulic fracturing technology. But while North Dakota’s shale oil boom has kept unemployment there below 4 percent, Pennsylvania’s is only slightly below the national average, at 7.7 percent.
“The reason, of course,” he writes, “is that Pennsylvania has around 20 times as many people as North Dakota.”