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Five-Year Trends Available for Median Income, Poverty and Internet Use
- cbluth 8y agoThe poverty rates and broadband service maps look like the other, except opposite.
- craftyguy 8y agoI think it makes sense, since broadband internet is relatively expensive compared to other utilities that are more necessary. For example, if you have $50 a month to spend on either electricity or broadband internet, you're probably going to spend it on electricity (nevermind the fact that an inet connection is useless if you have no electricity). Did you expect it to be different?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mod 8y agoI agree it makes sense, but I think your example is ridiculous. In my (rural) area, DSL internet is the only decent option, and I pay about $72/month for it. It's acceptable, streams netflix okay, but I could never be competitive in a FPS. But people around here are more interested in more traditional activities. I think their rate of watching TV and engaging with their phones and other similar measures would be far, far less than the national average. I simply think internet is not a priority; they'd rather be outside. At least in my small bubble.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoIs there any data to support that rural dwellers spend more time outside than dense urban dwellers? I’d expect the opposite, especially in cold weather.
- reaperducer 8y agoIt's a lot easier to go for a hike, paddle a canoe down a river, go fishing, hunting, climb a mountain, etc... in a rural area than in an urban one.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoI’ve lived in Boston and Manhattan before and it was super easy to do all those things apart from climbing a mountain (which is hard to do anywhere there’s not a mountain, regardless ofbeing rural or urban) or hunting. In fact, I would usually just walk or take a train to these activities, and likely could commute to do them faster than people not in a city. Hunting is probably the main exception, but I don’t think it's meaningful for the point of this thread. One of my primary hobbies in Boston was taking a bus to the Middlesex Fells nature reserve and hiking all day to find geocaches. Most people I knew also primarly engaged in outdoor, physically vigorous activities like kayaking/rowing, long distance jogging and bicycle riding.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoThey're more likely to have outdoor jobs and tons more likely to spend any recreational time outdoors. City people drink their beer in a bar. Country people drink their beer standing around a pile of burning pallets.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoThis just seems like an assertion. I suspect it is wrong.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoCompare the nature of available forms of employment and recreation in urban areas to those in rural areas. The outdoor options for recreation are somewhat more sparse in urban areas. The indoor options for employment are much more sparse in rural areas. White collar jobs are overwhelmingly located in urban and suburban areas. You've got teachers and dentists and stuff like that in rural areas but those scale with population so they don't affect the proportional difference between urban/rural.
- walshemj 8y agoReally I pay $25 a month in the UK and that's for a high end one not the cheapo ISP's like plusnet. An your paying almost as much as my last employer did for ELM when we moved offices at short notice < a month. Shows the positive side of local loop unbundling.
- elliekelly 8y ago>I think it makes sense, since broadband internet is relatively expensive compared to other utilities that are more necessary. An internet connection isn't regulated as a utility. As far as the law is concerned, the internet is a luxury item so access/quality/cost is set by the market. Telephone companies (or I should say, company: Bell) operated in much the same way 100 years ago until state utility commissions started to regulate them as utilities and cap the price they could charge for local calls. Since the state had no jurisdiction over long-distance charges, those prices skyrocketed to make up the difference. In the 80's the DOJ finally wrapped up the antitrust case against "Ma Bell" that broke the company into several smaller phone service providers. With a lot of competing operators the prices were reasonable. More importantly, while telephone service was regulated as a utility the state utility commissions had largely required Bell to wire rural areas for service the same as they had wired cities.
- craftyguy 8y agoJust because one government chooses to not regulate it as a utility does not mean it is not a utility. It can be argued that internet access is more of a utility today than it was in the past, and is likely to become increasingly more crucial for folks to have. Many local, state, and national communications are over the internet, more and more jobs require it to some degree (and having internet helps find new jobs more than not having it). donald's 'official' communication mechanism is twitter, which requires internet access. > The term utilities can also refer to the set of services provided by these organizations consumed by the public: Coal, electricity, natural gas, water, sewage, telephone, and transportation. Broadband internet services (both fixed-line and mobile) are increasingly being included within the definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility
- elliekelly 8y agoI wasn't arguing with you. To the contrary - I agree. In 2018 the internet is just as necessary as electricity. I was merely pointing out why it's the most expensive of the "utilities" you listed.
- sbr464 8y agoMississippi looks particularly bleak in regards to broadband speeds.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 8y agoOh wow. Especially with its juxtaposition with Alabama. I bet the map looks even more bleak in another five years.
- scarface74 8y agoSerious none snarky question. Is there anything about Mississippi that is not bleak? I’ve lived in GA all of my life and at least we have the Atlanta metro and to a lesser extent Macon and Savannah. Tennessee has some cities that I wouldn’t mind living in.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoMaybe some people don’t like living in cities and see your pros as cons?
- moorhosj 8y agoSlow broadband, high poverty, poor education and high obesity are pretty universal “cons”..
- heywot 8y agoAnd not all of those are represented in rural areas. And "slow broadband" feels hilariously out of place in that list.
- scarface74 8y agoTell that to developers who would be able to get a better paying job working remotely if they had decent broadband.
- stdplaceholder 8y agoThis summary of facts seems quite useless, presented as it is by county. If poverty declined in two counties and increased in two counties, it makes a difference which counties were which. If Mono County and Alpine County are declining and San Mateo and Santa Clara are increasing, that is a very different phenomenon than the reverse.
- craftyguy 8y agoI agree. The maps weight counties by area (naturally), but it would have been more useful to weight counties by population. A 2% increase in poverty in a county with 1 million people is more significant than a 2% increase in poverty in a county with 1000 people.
- shaki-dora 8y agoAs you note, this is just a summary of some highlights. The “new” in this news just happens to be the availability of data at the regional level. Overall data waspreviously released, and is therefore not featured in this press release.
- reaperducer 8y agoThis summary of facts seems quite useless, presented as it is by county. My guess is that it's by county because this is 2018. The full census is done every ten years. More granular information will come after the next full census.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoAssuming it’s properly funded and executed, which the current party in power probably doesn’t want.
- welliman 8y agoBlatant plug: for large scale analysis on census and survey data I'd recommend checking out nhgis.org. It lets you download the large pieces of demographic data that you may be interested in. Data harmonized across time is also available to investigate trends. Note: We don't have the 5-year 2017 ACS data yet (it takes about 2 weeks for us to ingest the data once it comes out). Disclosure: I'm a developer at IPUMS.
- philrhurst 8y agoI've used ACS and IPUMS data previously for research while at university. What are your thoughts on the proposed "differential privacy" changes [0] coming this way? Is it a "sky is falling" kind of situation? [0] https://www.ipums.org/census-bureau-data.shtml https://www.ipums.org/census-bureau-data.shtml
- welliman 8y agoIt's not really my area of expertise, but from what I understand it will severely limit what policy and demographic research can be done with the data. There's a working paper on the page you linked to which has more information: https://assets.ipums.org/_files/mpc/MPC-Working-Paper-2018-6.pdf https://assets.ipums.org/_files/mpc/MPC-Working-Paper-2018-6....
- jdlyga 8y agoI'd love to see a map that shows trends. Which areas are getting richer? Which are getting poorer?
- michaelkschmidt 8y agoMaps like this give a sobering view of the Healthcare debate. Insurance for a family is now > $20K a year. Look at how many counties this would be half or more of the median pay. The whole situation seems like a melt-down ready to happen.
- hnaccy 8y ago>The whole situation seems like a melt-down ready to happen. How will it melt down, won't they just become infirm or die?
- drspacemonkey 8y agoMy guess is that it would be more like "get sick, don't seek healthcare until it's an emergency, go to emergency room, rack up many thousands of dollars in medical debt, be unable to pay it back, linger for a while, then die".
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- smileysteve 8y agoSkyrocketing bankruptcy rates and losses of generational wealth. Potentially causing the next recession. Or, we modify the system, the whole health insurance industry and hospital industry causes a recession.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Skyrocketing bankruptcy rates and losses of generational wealth. The people who can't afford insurance aren't the people that have substantial generational wealth to lose, generally.
- deleted 8y ago
- prossercj 8y agoThis seems to show generally higher incomes around metropolitan areas, which I would have expected. But there are some areas in the 75k+ bracket that surprise me, such as: 1) Western and northeastern Wyoming 2) Western North Dakota 3) Northern Alaska Does anyone know why that might be the case, and where the money could be coming from? (National parks? Military bases? Oil fields?)
- fetus8 8y agoOil Fields. Western Wyoming has some crazy huge oil fields and refineries. I would assume similar cases for North Dakota and Alaska as well, but I don't know for sure.
- iooi 8y agoND: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom Alaska: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_North_Slope#Petroleum_resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_North_Slope#Petroleum_r...
- dx87 8y agoYep. My father works at an oil refinery in Northern Alaska and everyone there is making well over 100k, around 200k for middle management, plus benefits like a pension. Downside is that it's a frozen tundra where you can't go outside without protective goggles to keep your eyes from freezing shut, but they also work 2 weeks on / 2 weeks off, so it's basically 6 months of vacation every year, in addition to normal vacation days. He said some people chose to live in warmer places like Puerto Rico and just fly back and forth every 2 weeks.
- ghaff 8y ago>work 2 weeks on / 2 weeks off I haven't been in the oil business for a very long time but that was a very common pattern for offshore drilling rigs and the like. The interval of weeks varied from 1 to 4 as I recall generally based on how remote the location was.
- 8y ago
- amyjess 8y agoOoh... this seems nice. I'll have to update my census tool with this at some point... I think I'm still using the 2011-2015 dataset.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>From 2013-2017 among geographic areas with 10,000 people or more, the locations with the highest and lowest poverty rates were: >By metropolitan statistical area: >Barnstable Town, Mass As someone unfortunately familiar with the local economy in that cesspool (will global warming hurry up and wash that glorified sandbar away already?) this is a great illustration of how stats like this can be limited. There is no shortage of money in Barnstable county. It is chock full of old retired people and rich people (with a significant overlap). They mostly happen to have primary residences elsewhere. Lots of people have their primary residence in Florida. The only industry is tourism. For three months of the year there is a firehouse of money directed at Barnstable county. The economic incentives that come with that mean that everyone tries to rip everyone else off and extract maximum value from everyone else (I could go on a pretty good rant about this). The blue collar tradesmen get very good at keeping their income off the books (I don't blame them, not doing so would be a competitive disadvantage). Everyone has an under the table side gig. Many "businesses" pay employees in cash. Jobs are often paid in cash. Cape Cod is the Long Island of New England. While it's no SF suburb there is a ton of money in Barnstable county. It's just that most of it gets reported elsewhere or never gets reported at all so the county looks poor on paper. The absurdly high cost of living doesn't help (doesn't help the people actually struggling to get by that is). Housing is not as insane as Silly Valley but every other thing is priced outrageously (what the market will bear thanks to tourism) and you can't avoid those costs because you're basically on an island. So yeah, take those stats with a grain of salt. I suspect the national stats are quite accurate but the county by county numbers are probably not that great.
- chaostheory 8y ago> Loudoun County, Va.; Fairfax County, Va.; Howard County, Md.; Falls Church City, Va.; and Arlington County, Va., were among the highest counties by median household income. Are these counties where lobbyists live?
- cwal37 8y agoLots and lots and lots of dual-income lawyers and consultants. This is one of the areas where, on average, women have their first child at a very late age[1]. Lobbying across a wide array of industries but also defense contractors and such. I was actually just looking at median home sizes/prices[2] in that area for June of this year. I live in Arlington, bought a house earlier this year and discovered $425k is pretty much the bottom of the non-condo market, we only saw about 1 go up per month and everything closed immediately. Feels nuts here. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir... [2] https://twitter.com/ConnorWaldoch/status/1070301922349981697 https://twitter.com/ConnorWaldoch/status/1070301922349981697
- nostrademons 8y ago$425K seems delightful here in Silicon Valley, where the bottom of the non-condo market is about $1.3M and the bottom of the condo market is roughly $900K.
- cwal37 8y agoShould have known I couldn't mention housing prices without comparisons to the literally-the-most-extreme outlier bay area. The DC area isn't geographically constrained the same way, doesn't have the same concentration of hyper wealth, has immediately-adjacent jurisdictions with regulatory setups more amenable to development to California, and a much better/more extensive transit system. Salaries for your typical fed or consultant here don't come close to the engineering compensation in the bay for lower level employees. Also, it's not $425k for a single family home. It's $425k for a 60-70 year old brick or cinderblock townhome/duplex between 800-1000 sqft that was constructed as WW2-boom housing.
- dahfizz 8y ago> Of the 3,142 counties in the United States, median household income declined in 222 counties (7.1 percent), while median household income increased in 521 counties (16.6 percent) Does this mean that ~75% of counties had excatly zero change in median income? Like down to the cent? With or without inflation? This is difficult to believe. Even with stagnant wages you would expect some up and down across the whole country.
- IkmoIkmo 8y agoIt's a census, so they're taking a sample. I would assume that 75% of counties had statistical outcomes that weren't statistically significantly different from the previous measurement. Consider if you sample the same county on the same day 10 times, you'll get 10 different outcomes, that doesn't mean income changed that day. In addition, they may have used a threshold value. But it's not noted anywhere. I'd also assume indeed there was inflation-adjustment.
- vaughnegut 8y agoBut if you take a mean of those samples' means it would approach the population mean with an approximately normal distribution. Isn't that only an improvement? (Disclaimer I've only taken intro to stats at an undergrad level, exam next week)
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Does this mean that ~75% of counties had excatly zero change in median income? Like down to the cent? Well, no, the ACS uses whole dollars as the indivisible unit for income stats. And it is estimated, not actual, with a reported (non-zero) margin of error for each figure in the source. E.g., here's the national median income table for 2017, by various characteristics: https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
- csytan 8y agoQuickie visualization from the recently released census: Poverty rate vs election results https://twitter.com/csytan/status/1070800405125201920 https://twitter.com/csytan/status/1070800405125201920 Posted on Twitter because HN doesn't support images
- jxramos 8y agoWhy is the government still bothering with such a variable quantity like household income, why not per capita? Household income introduces unnecessary complexity with how family sizes change over the decades, between ethnicity, by divorce, and all sorts of other confounding factors. https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/09/16/misleading-statistics https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/09/16/misleading...
- belorn 8y agoSimply because social economical status is a better prediction model. Family members of a upper class household has more in common than peers of the same income.