I've seen other figures that suggest that about 80K people lost their jobs immediately. I guess I'm not convinced that the rest of the job losses were due to economic pessimism and fear in the financial markets. I was assuming it included the bodega guy, the guy working for the bodega guy, couriers, tailors, every other small business owner in the area, people servicing those small business owners, the carpet cleaners, window washers, the outsourced IT guys, people servicing the physical infrastructure of the area, people who worked in the other buildings. etc. I could be totally off base, but blasting out part of the infrastructure of a city of 19M people seems like it could cause a relatively "direct" 2% job loss over 3 months.
The thing about job loss from the destruction of buildings is that most of it comes right back.. in a different building. It's only bad locally and temporarily.
I don't know if that's necessarily true. The downtown of the small city where I grew up was destroyed by a simultaneous flood and fire and most of the downtown businesses simply disappeared forever. Many small businesses are in economically tenuous positions and a catastrophic event will wipe them out. This causes all the employes to lose their jobs, and a chain reaction to other small businesses who relied upon the destroyed businesses. Applied to NYC scale, suggesting the job loss numbers mean "direct" unemployment in this sense seems reasonable to me, but I could be wrong.
