13 ms·

America has two economies, and they’re diverging fast

194 points by siberianbear 7y ago

logicchains 7y ago
I really appreciate how this article just presents information without trying to blame anyone or push a political agenda.
- inimino 7y ago
  Not sure if you're joking, but just in case you're not... to me the political agenda was particularly clear.
  - logicchains 7y ago
    I wasn't joking. Seems to me it could just as easily be used to support the "liberal elites are out of touch with real Americans" narrative as the "Tump voters are dumb bumpkins" narrative.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      If the first two sentences weren’t enough of a clue, maybe you’ve just become numb to it all over the last 3 years.
    - inimino 7y ago
      Well, yes it could. Because it's a brilliant example of liberal elites being out of touch with real Americans.
      - dlp211 7y ago
        What exactly is a Real American?
        inimino 7y ago
        If I ask you if you're American and you say yes, then guess what? You're a Real American.
        nickthemagicman 7y ago
        People who dont hate freedom /s
      - iron0013 7y ago
        You’re gonna need to explain what you mean by “real Americans” because I’m pretty sure the the urban, liberal, multicultural folks in this country outnumber the white, rural, conservative ones. What’s your criteria for a “real” American? (as if we didn’t already know)
        inimino 7y ago
        If you already know, why do you need me to explain? Are you just trying to be smart? (as if you actually know)
        iron0013 7y ago
        Why did you dodge the question? Who do you consider a real American and why? And if the answer is "someone who self-identifies as an American", why do you think that doesn't include liberals?
        inimino 7y ago
        Why did you ask a question in bad faith? > doesn't include liberals Where did I ever say that, pray tell?
- kasey_junk 7y ago
  The Brookings Institution is a think tank with a stated bias & political agenda. The last couple of paragraphs especially are pretty clearly pushing an agenda.
DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
Wow, this really blew my mind. The divergence is striking. Even without words, the article really explains the contemporary social situation in the US. It makes me wonder if remote-work, high COL in tech hubs, higher-ed cost exhaustion, tech burn-out, and the next recession will reconfigure things. Like the article states, the amount of unbalance here can't be sustainable though "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" kind of idea should be kept front and center in this discussion. I am worried a massive wealth transfer coordinated by the government (e.g., single payer healthcare, UBI, basic housing guarantee, free college, etc.) will entrench this divergence. I wish we had let the last recession ('08) actual happen instead of cheap money for a decade allowing us to kick the can down the road. Intervention in the capital markets a la the past decade probably amplified this phenomenon by pulling money from productive, structural capacity increases instead of to loss-leading Unicorns that wouldn't work in an economic system that accurately priced risk (i.e., higher interest rates). A company like Uber, though amazing to me and I use all the time, could only exist with cheap money for a decade. The idea of building a company by losing money for 10 years in order to build your client base is impossible if rates are high. That capital would have looked for more "real" investments that probably would have valued what these areas that lost GDP over the past decade could have provided.
- rayiner 7y ago
  > what these areas that lost GDP over the past decade could have provided. The data isn’t measuring areas that most GDP over the past decade. It’s measuring the average GDP per capita of areas that voted Democrat/Republican in 2008 and 2016, which is a different set of areas. What it’s showing is the economic sorting that happened in the 2016 election, with higher income suburban areas voting more consistently Democrat, with lower income rural areas voting more consistently Republican. That doesn’t say anything about the incomes of any given place, since the set of places wasn’t held constant.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    And I think more important than the places not being held constant, the people weren't held constant either. That is, people move. Many of these more rural areas are basically seeing a massive exodus of young people who are moving to cities and other places with more opportunity. The people staying behind are then those who are older or those who find it difficult to move, or those who don't have the ambition to move in the first place. So the self-sorting then only accelerates.
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mehrdadn 7y ago
I wish their charts didn't just draw straight lines from 2008 to 2018 data points. The data points in between could be meaningful.
- falcor84 7y ago
  Hear hear. And it would it also have been very useful to see some data points from before 2008 to better understand the trends
- Yhippa 7y ago
  I woke up early and can't get back to sleep so my phone is in Digital Wellbeing mode (grayscale screen). Those chart lines are nearly impossible to distinguish from each other. Should have gone with a dash or other marking.
  - ulfw 7y ago
    or I don't know, maybe you should turn off your 'Digital Wellbeing mode'?
    - saspiesas 7y ago
      They can, but that's not an option for colorblind people?
      - ulfw 7y ago
        Absolutely true. That was not the argument made though.
    - mstade 7y ago
      I get where you're coming from with this, but it's snarky and the parent comment does have a point: these charts aren't very good renderings. There are no legends, so taken out of context you'd have to just know what the colors mean. In grayscale they are virtually the same, so you couldn't tell anyway. Even if they draw the lines the same, they could've used different style endpoints. Again though, without a legend you wouldn't know which is which. Even if you're not in "wellness" mode you may be in say, "color blind" mode (sadly not really optional) and in that case these may be particularly difficult to read. They don't have vertical axes either, so putting the charts side by side or overlaid doesn't make sense, because you can't know if they are the same scale unless you compare the endpoint numbers. (Hint: they aren't the same scale.) These charts aren't necessarily misleading by design, but they lack the fidelity they probably should have in order to be truly useful, particularly taken out of context.
Merrill 7y ago
>"As such, the Democratic Party is now anchored in the nation’s booming, but highly unequal, metro areas, while the GOP relies on aging and economically stagnant manufacturing-reliant rural and exurban communities." The analysis of averages can be misleading. Democratic districts appear to include both some of the poorest urban cores and wealthiest suburbs. I wonder how the GINI coefficient of Republican versus Democratic districts compares? Also, the makeup of the 111th House was 256 D, 178 R and the makeup of the 116th House was 235 D, 199 R, a swing of about 10 districts to the Republicans. But note that in the 114th House the makeup had been 188 D, 247 R and the map was even redder.
- mynameishere 7y ago
  GINI coefficient of Republican versus Democratic districts You can get an idea from the states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co... It won't surprise you to reveal that Utah features the greatest amount of economic equality. When you chart Democrats' income it tends to be bimodal--poor people voting for tax money and rich people voting for [insert mystery reasons here--stopping climate change? ethnic interests? to please TV clowns?].
  - notacoward 7y ago
    Mostly, the "mystery reason" is that self-interested voting is prevalent only among the needy and the greedy. At one end are those who feel it's necessary for their own survival (even when they're wrong or when the policies they vote for actually harm them). At the other end are the rentiers who never had any guiding principle other than self-interest. In between are the many reasonably-prosperous and mostly-urban folks who can afford to vote their conscience. When the personal effect of a policy ranges from slight benefit to slight harm, in neither case affecting one's basic quality of life or social standing, it becomes a lot easier to vote for policies that one sincerely and logically believes are best in a utilitarian sense.
    - scarface74 7y ago
transfire 7y ago
I wonder how much the lack of high-speed Internet plays into the stagnant economic prosperity of rural America.
- inimino 7y ago
  Probably not much. It doesn't help, but by the time $60/mo is a lot to pay (for Comcast trash internet no less) you're already hurting.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  Not a lot. High-speed Internet is good to have, but it does not make your farm better, productivity higher and product prices higher. You don't "digitally enhance" your manufacturing plant with faster Internet unless the speed of Internet is keeping you from achieving better productivity - most of the time, not the case, plants have all local systems and they use SCADA, not fancy screens or kubernetes.
  - PorterDuff 7y ago
    Perhaps the general hope is that we can replace all wealth due to manufacturing, resource extraction, food production, with that produced via internet advertising.
    - AdrianB1 7y ago
      I haven't seen yet anyone eating internet advertising, living in it, heating with it, driving it etc.
pge 7y ago
One major factor that needs to be considered when looking at these data is that the electoral districts (the unit of measure here) were redrawn with significant changes after the 2010 census (taking control of state legislatures in order to redraw the maps to be much more favorable was a key component of Republican strategy). As a result conparing 2008 and 2018 as if those congressional districts were the same may be skewed.
- vitus 7y ago
  Yeah. I was disappointed to see that there wasn't a comparison between 2011 and 2013 to try to identify how big that effect was. Wikipedia has images that can give a vague idea of the geographic shift (which I like especially because they show which districts flipped in the election). It looks to me that some of the major shifts were independent of gerrymandering (e.g. Dakotas becoming solidly Republican, Dem control solidifying over coastal Pacific and around NYC), while others might have been tied to it (e.g. compaction of Dem control in UT, AL, MS). 2010 election: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/2010_House_elections.svg/400px-2010_House_elections.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/20... 2012 election: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/US_House_2012.svg/400px-US_House_2012.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/US... 2018 election: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/US_House_2018.svg/400px-US_House_2018.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/US...
helpPeople 7y ago
I'm not Republican or Democrat, but I find the Math provided not agreeing with their conclusions. Given more than 60% of tech workers do not identify as Democrat, the conclusions that tech workers are Democrats are silly. I identify with only a few Democrat Candidates and fiscally think Democrats are regressive. That said, Republicans also don't align with my social or economic views. (Tariffs and government spending) If I had to guess why this article exists, they are pressuring people into thinking educated rich people vote Democrat.
- viraptor 7y ago
  > Given more than 60% of tech workers do not identify as Democrat [citation needed] But for clarity, I'd like to see "identify as X" and "identify as neither". For some numbers which don't agree see https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/6/16260326/tech-entrepreneurs-survey-politics-liberal-regulation-unions https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/6/16260326/te... "They found that, broadly speaking, tech entrepreneurs are pretty liberal. 75.2 percent voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and 61.3 percent identified as Democrats"
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    Yeah dude doesn't realize there is the catch all part of independents who make up more registered people than either dem or republican party.
Havoc 7y ago
I suspect this is exactly what makes the Trump-style platforms viable even if they make no real sense.
jstewartmobile 7y ago
All of these think tanks devour money from God-knows-who and shit it out into a "lies, damn lies, and statistics" narrative for God-knows-what-purpose. All I'm reading out of this--in-between the lines of course--is "Booga booga red staters! You're all going down into an abyss of poverty and opioid addiction. Better sell the farm, borrow six figures for a new job credential, prostrate yourself before any corporation that might take you in, move to the city, and spend $2k/month to live in a shoebox" In other words, wall street wants even more tropical mansions.
danmaz74 7y ago
In other words, Trump's Republican party is losing votes in more highly educated districts, which not surprisingly fare better in the information-age economy. Conversely, it gains votes in districts with a lower education.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  Are the Republicans "Trump's party" or Trump is just riding the wave?
  - PorterDuff 7y ago
    Both? My guess is that the dividing line between 'Red' and 'Blue' is being renegotiated as we speak. The post-WWI political arguments, largely about economics, are being replaced by something new. Trump obviously has a good nose for these matters.
austincheney 7y ago
There are only two charts in that article that matter. The ones on productivity and education. These explain everything else in the article. The article over generalizes on geography. My city is deeply red but it recently passed San Francisco in population and is growing faster in nearly all metrics including jobs, housing, wages, and so forth. I think the article is generally correct in that urban clusters tend to be more blue and rural areas tend to be more red, but that is a product of population density more than anything economically related. Despite my city now having more people than San Francisco it is also growing geographically and can maintain its average density. It is now geographically larger than Dallas. If this rate of growth is maintained this city may enter the top ten of US cities, both area and population, over coming decades and it will probably continue to be a red congressional district. Also, next door is a suburb that is possibly the wealthiest mid-sized city in the country and it’s also in this red district.
ethbro 7y ago
YES. This article clearly answers what I was asking about a month after the presidential election. "Why aren't Democrats trying to answer everyone's problems? And realizing that someone is telling you they have a need if they vote for the other party?" Turns out, politics is in its own filter bubble. Democrats honestly can't relate to rural or manufacturing areas anymore, and Republicans can't relate to urban or technology areas.
- throwaway6734 7y ago
  > "Why aren't Democrats trying to answer everyone's problems? And realizing that someone is telling you they have a need if they vote for the other party?" Not true in all cases. Particularly look at what is going on with farmers in the midwest voting directly against their economic self interest.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    There are cultural interest that they have that supersede any economic interest. I’ll leave it to the reader to make their own inference.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Why is it bad when farmers in the Midwest vote their conscience, against their supposed self interest, but it’s good for rich programmers to vote against their self interest? The Trump tax cuts were good for me—am I obliged to vote for him?
    - throwaway6734 7y ago
      I should have been clearer. Voting against your self interest is not an issue (and can even be admirable). The issue I have is farmers relying on state welfare to stay solvent while they vote against their economic interests.
    - stjohnswarts 7y ago
      His attempts to become an authoritarian and being a Russian puppet however are not good for you. I would say that's against every American's interest. Lower taxes or not. By the way 75% of his tax reductions went to the richest 5% and the middle class tax deductions expire in a few years.
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georgeecollins 7y ago
This article shows that districts that tend to vote democratic are more prosperous, and the gap is growing. However, people who are more prosperous* (income > $200k) tend to vote Republican over all. I can't explain that. If I were going to guess it would be because older people tend to have more wealth and income in America (in general) and older people sku more republican. *https://brandongaille.com/24-interesting-republican-vs-democrat-demographics/ https://brandongaille.com/24-interesting-republican-vs-democ...
- bandrami 7y ago
  It's mostly gaslighting. Democrats win voters making $50K or less, Republicans win voters making $50K or more. There are a couple of small-ish inversions where Democrats do well with people making $150K-$200K and Republicans do well with people making $35K-$45K, and that gets spun out into all sorts of things it's not. Trump's economic sweet spot, for instance, was $75K. Not coincidentally, that is the median income for a two-earner family of two white high school graduates. But calling that "the working class" really misses the point.
  - georgeecollins 7y ago
    I don't think anybody is gaslighting. This report is all about facts, and all I was trying to do was point out another fact. The point remains that republicans are really popular in the places where there is less opportunity. Here is a point I will make that is political: The places that are run by very liberal local governments, such as California and New York have the majority of the growth. I always see these articles about how business and people are fleeing to low tax places. Except the growth continues to swamp that effect.
    - bandrami 7y ago
      > republicans are really popular in the places where there is less opportunity No, I'm saying that's not quite it. There is an income correlation among white voters: the poorer a white voter is, the less likely he was to vote for Trump. It's just a very shallow one with a couple of convex points at a couple of income levels.
tsss 7y ago
> Democratic districts have seen their median household income soar in a decade—from $54,000 in 2008 to $61,000 in 2018. During that decade the US had an inflation rate between 1 and 2%, which is around $5-10k. So really there was no "soaring" at all: democrats barely manage to hold on to their wealth/lifestyle while republicans are continuously losing and worse off than the years before. Everyone in the country is losing except for Jeff Bezos and his caste of rich capitalists who are served by the corrupt politicians of either party.
theNJR 7y ago
This makes me think about the book 'Coming Apart' [0] which was an eye opening read which predicts all of this. As a tech/media person in a democratic costal city, there is a whole other America that, it turns out, I know very little about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)
- galangalalgol 7y ago
  As a dev from flyover country what was something that surprised you? Getting rid of misconceptions is the sort of glue that could prevent this.
inimino 7y ago
In case anyone was wondering why the level of statistical sophistication on show here would embarrass many an English major, the primary author, Mark Muro, was educated at Harvard and Berkeley, where he was presumably better at English literature than he now is at statistics or statistics-heavy journalism. Here is his CV: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/metro_20160809_markmurocv.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/metro_2... Including this gem from almost a decade ago: “Bill Gates, Not Congress, Has the Solution to Global Warming.” The Avenue, A blog of The New Republic. January 25, 2010. I'm glad that worked out so well for us. Don't miss this: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/08/23/instead-of-bemoaning-wealth-work-make-it-better/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/08/23/instead... Tl;dr: "wealth work" is here to stay, yes it's a "servant economy" but we should just tax and regulate, so that the servants feel better about their jobs walking the dogs of people too rich and lazy to walk their own dogs.
awareBrah 7y ago
It didn’t get mentioned in the article but a huge reason of this over the last 10 years is just the number of people in blue states moving to red states. The migration has been striking, just how many people are leaving NY, California, NJ, Connecticut, etc for places like Texas and Florida. One billionaire left NJ and singlehandedly broke the states budget. I’m amazed that the current field of democratic candidates are what they came up with. It is no question that trump is winning again.
- throwaway6734 7y ago
  > It didn’t get mentioned in the article but a huge reason of this over the last 10 years is just the number of people in blue states moving to red states. Huge reason for what? Income growth is happening in blue districts not red. > It is no question that trump is winning again. Last I checked he's getting crushed in polls by almost every major dem candidate.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    He got crushed in the polls in 2016. He also lost the popular vote. But he could once again easily win the electoral vote and lose the popular vote.
    - stjohnswarts 7y ago
      Due to more gerrymandering I believe he could lose by up to 8 million or so votes and still win because of the electoral college. It's pretty depressing when you think about it.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Gerrymandering doesn’t have anything to do with the presidential elections. Gerrymandering refers to state legislations drawing districts to have an advantage in state and house elections. Electoral college votes are strictly determined by the census.
  - 7y ago
nemetroid 7y ago
The charts have a number of issues. With some changes, they can easily show the significance along with the trend itself. I created a new version of figure 2, which fixes some of the issues: https://svgur.com/i/F35.svg https://svgur.com/i/F35.svg [SVG] * Bar charts are preferred when presenting a population of something (people or jobs) * Each Y-axis starts at zero * Charts that (by definition) add up to 100% are shown as stacked * The y-axis max is set to 100% where possible (except in one case, where this obscured the trend) (I couldn't get Google Sheets to make a nice x-axis for the first chart)
- chewbacha 7y ago
  Thank you! The charts really bothered me and this shows that the article is portraying the trends a little more aggressively than they really are. I still think having only two data points (one during the Great Recession and one in 2018) reeks of cherry picking. I’d like the author to have provided more historical data to demonstrate the effect.
- paulsutter 7y ago
  Your charts could never get published, they’re just not hyperbolic enough > a series of genuine, penetrating shifts have been happening at warp speed through the last decade. These shifts are massively altering the two parties’ economic identities.
- jpster 7y ago
  Thank you! And how did you learn these guidelines? Is there a book or blog post you recommend for data visualization best practices?
  - kk58 7y ago
    Nathan yau has a great book
  - fact_factory 7y ago
    this [0] website and the book [1] it references might interest you: [0] https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-naked/ https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-na... [1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
mystique 7y ago
Are these conclusions correct though? They show the electoral map and the districts that were lost. Those are more rural and more traditional industry focused areas. It is more likely that coastal Democrat's income and education was always higher than rural leaning counties and remained at par between these two time periods. To state that this materially changes the Democratic party is not right.
patientplatypus 7y ago
Just wait until the next economic crash. Every central bank on the planet is more less out of the fire power they had in 2008 to put a bottom to the market. And most major countries now have extremely right wing or tin pot dictators. We're going to see it get nasty. And most indications are saying that it will happen in October. What worries me most is that Trump will just refuse to leave office if he loses the next general election. We found out this week that he was talking to the Ukrainian president to get dirt on Joe Biden (holy shit Batman!). And we also know that odds are he'll be prosecuted for all of his crimes when he leaves office - maybe he just won't. Dark times.
chewbacha 7y ago
I stopped reading when figure one showed only two data points on a chart without zero based y-axis. It portrays a divergence that -looks- like a multi factor difference, but is only a 20% at most divergence. This coupled without historical comparison for normal variance and the repeated use of excited adjectives, makes for an alarmist article.
echelon 7y ago
Something this article doesn't specifically call out is age. Anecdotally, it seems that the upcoming generations are more liberal than the last, and that the older population is simply dying off. Perhaps someone can cite direct evidence of this?
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  I agree. The article is generally lacking demographic data. Are younger, better educated, more productive people moving from red to blue districts? Is the share of the population living in the red districts shrinking? There are a lot of open questions.
bensonn 7y ago
“Blue” territories have seen their productivity climb from $118,000 per worker in 2008 to $139,000 in 2018. Republican-district productivity, by contrast, remains stuck at about $110,000. How is productivity measured? I have wondered about this stat as I have seen it used many times over the years but I can't figure out what and how they are measuring or who is doing the measuring. Take Weyerhaeuser as an example- they own 26 million acres of land across North America, have 10,000 employees and 7+ billion in revenue. Recently their corporate headquarters moved to Seattle. Is their 7 billion in revenue spread across all the loggers, drivers and mill workers in remote forest locations? Boeing is another example with headquarters in Chicago but as far as I know they don't make any planes in Chicago. Are these stats pulled from census, irs, labor...? Am I wrong or cynical in thinking these are lazy stats and most of the "productivity" is attributed to the small percentage of employees in the corporate HQs? I can't imagine a fed bean-counter following around logging trucks in remote areas to make sure the productivity is attributed to the correct region.
- beefman 7y ago
  Productivity is measured by dividing GDP by total hours worked, with the assumptions that GDP is caused by work and that the relationship is linear. The latter assumption is false and the former is highly suspect. You raise a good question about localization of GDP. The global economy is a highly-connected network. It's often unclear how to draw valid conclusions from national accounts, let alone the local accounting attempted here. That said, I think there most likely is a trend of the kind imagined by the authors and that it's showing up in these figures. Showing up is the most it's doing though.
_edo 7y ago
I would really enjoy seeing an article like this paired with analysis from somebody with the same education level but from the University of Chicago economics department or something like that. They'd probably tell two very different stories. A few things that jumped out at me: Two of the sectors where the author is touting gains for Democrats both have significant left-leaning bias: academia and tech. How does that play into this? Democrats are getting more college degrees now, but which degrees? Why start so many graphs of Democrats doing better than Republicans in 2008 when we had a big recession and a new president who didn't prioritize rural America? Why not go back to 2000 or 1990 so we can get a bigger picture? And pardon my ignorance, but "GDP per seat"? And why is this graph next to Median household income? Are they saying that the changes in median household income are causing "GDP per seat" to rise? Urban populations have changed a lot in the past 10 years, are we even talking about the same households? Household income statistics are prone to distortions[0], GDP per seat is probably prone to even more, why not use GDP per capita? It feels like they were just happy to find two graphs where the Democrat line went up and the Republican line went down and they know most people will just glance at the graph without wasting their morning thinking about what GDP per seat really means and how it's affected by the population flows of the past decade. [0] - https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/09/16/misleading-statistics https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/09/16/misleading...
agsilvio 7y ago
I stopped reading at "low-skill".
- PorterDuff 7y ago
  lol. Good point. I would like to see everyone's list on what a 'skill' really means. It would make a good basis for a discussion. a quick edit: It's a question that really began gnawing at my mind over the last few minutes. What is a skill? To tell you the (highly likely) truth, I could probably take on the jobs the authors hold and do a perfectly acceptable professional job given a desk, a library, a phone, a web browser, and a five minute head start. Are they 'skilled'?
Bubbadoo 7y ago
Given much of the economic growth is in tech and tech tends to concentrate in urban centers, urban centers tend to be blue. Can this be much of a surprise? The Administration's self-promoted gains in manufacturing and mining are impaired by some of that technology. Automation has played huge roles in the very industries Trump heralded for his voter base in 2016. You no longer need an army of humans on the production floor or even in the coal mine, making those, formerly high-paying jobs, a thing of the past. This leaves an entire population of disenfranchised to whom immigrants are a major threat as is outsourcing. So these numbers and graphs should not be a surprise to anyone.

194 points by siberianbear 7y ago

I really appreciate how this article just presents information without trying to blame anyone or push a political agenda.

inimino 7y ago
Not sure if you're joking, but just in case you're not... to me the political agenda was particularly clear.
- logicchains 7y ago
  I wasn't joking. Seems to me it could just as easily be used to support the "liberal elites are out of touch with real Americans" narrative as the "Tump voters are dumb bumpkins" narrative.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    If the first two sentences weren’t enough of a clue, maybe you’ve just become numb to it all over the last 3 years.
  - inimino 7y ago
    Well, yes it could. Because it's a brilliant example of liberal elites being out of touch with real Americans.
    - dlp211 7y ago
      What exactly is a Real American?
      - inimino 7y ago
        If I ask you if you're American and you say yes, then guess what? You're a Real American.
      - nickthemagicman 7y ago
        People who dont hate freedom /s
    - iron0013 7y ago
      You’re gonna need to explain what you mean by “real Americans” because I’m pretty sure the the urban, liberal, multicultural folks in this country outnumber the white, rural, conservative ones. What’s your criteria for a “real” American? (as if we didn’t already know)
      - inimino 7y ago
        If you already know, why do you need me to explain? Are you just trying to be smart? (as if you actually know)
        iron0013 7y ago
        Why did you dodge the question? Who do you consider a real American and why? And if the answer is "someone who self-identifies as an American", why do you think that doesn't include liberals?
        inimino 7y ago
        Why did you ask a question in bad faith? > doesn't include liberals Where did I ever say that, pray tell?
kasey_junk 7y ago
The Brookings Institution is a think tank with a stated bias & political agenda. The last couple of paragraphs especially are pretty clearly pushing an agenda.

DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago

Wow, this really blew my mind. The divergence is striking. Even without words, the article really explains the contemporary social situation in the US. It makes me wonder if remote-work, high COL in tech hubs, higher-ed cost exhaustion, tech burn-out, and the next recession will reconfigure things. Like the article states, the amount of unbalance here can't be sustainable though "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" kind of idea should be kept front and center in this discussion. I am worried a massive wealth transfer coordinated by the government (e.g., single payer healthcare, UBI, basic housing guarantee, free college, etc.) will entrench this divergence. I wish we had let the last recession ('08) actual happen instead of cheap money for a decade allowing us to kick the can down the road. Intervention in the capital markets a la the past decade probably amplified this phenomenon by pulling money from productive, structural capacity increases instead of to loss-leading Unicorns that wouldn't work in an economic system that accurately priced risk (i.e., higher interest rates). A company like Uber, though amazing to me and I use all the time, could only exist with cheap money for a decade. The idea of building a company by losing money for 10 years in order to build your client base is impossible if rates are high. That capital would have looked for more "real" investments that probably would have valued what these areas that lost GDP over the past decade could have provided.

rayiner 7y ago
> what these areas that lost GDP over the past decade could have provided. The data isn’t measuring areas that most GDP over the past decade. It’s measuring the average GDP per capita of areas that voted Democrat/Republican in 2008 and 2016, which is a different set of areas. What it’s showing is the economic sorting that happened in the 2016 election, with higher income suburban areas voting more consistently Democrat, with lower income rural areas voting more consistently Republican. That doesn’t say anything about the incomes of any given place, since the set of places wasn’t held constant.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  And I think more important than the places not being held constant, the people weren't held constant either. That is, people move. Many of these more rural areas are basically seeing a massive exodus of young people who are moving to cities and other places with more opportunity. The people staying behind are then those who are older or those who find it difficult to move, or those who don't have the ambition to move in the first place. So the self-sorting then only accelerates.

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mehrdadn 7y ago

I wish their charts didn't just draw straight lines from 2008 to 2018 data points. The data points in between could be meaningful.

falcor84 7y ago
Hear hear. And it would it also have been very useful to see some data points from before 2008 to better understand the trends
Yhippa 7y ago
I woke up early and can't get back to sleep so my phone is in Digital Wellbeing mode (grayscale screen). Those chart lines are nearly impossible to distinguish from each other. Should have gone with a dash or other marking.
- ulfw 7y ago
  or I don't know, maybe you should turn off your 'Digital Wellbeing mode'?
  - saspiesas 7y ago
    They can, but that's not an option for colorblind people?
    - ulfw 7y ago
      Absolutely true. That was not the argument made though.
  - mstade 7y ago
    I get where you're coming from with this, but it's snarky and the parent comment does have a point: these charts aren't very good renderings. There are no legends, so taken out of context you'd have to just know what the colors mean. In grayscale they are virtually the same, so you couldn't tell anyway. Even if they draw the lines the same, they could've used different style endpoints. Again though, without a legend you wouldn't know which is which. Even if you're not in "wellness" mode you may be in say, "color blind" mode (sadly not really optional) and in that case these may be particularly difficult to read. They don't have vertical axes either, so putting the charts side by side or overlaid doesn't make sense, because you can't know if they are the same scale unless you compare the endpoint numbers. (Hint: they aren't the same scale.) These charts aren't necessarily misleading by design, but they lack the fidelity they probably should have in order to be truly useful, particularly taken out of context.

Merrill 7y ago

>"As such, the Democratic Party is now anchored in the nation’s booming, but highly unequal, metro areas, while the GOP relies on aging and economically stagnant manufacturing-reliant rural and exurban communities." The analysis of averages can be misleading. Democratic districts appear to include both some of the poorest urban cores and wealthiest suburbs. I wonder how the GINI coefficient of Republican versus Democratic districts compares? Also, the makeup of the 111th House was 256 D, 178 R and the makeup of the 116th House was 235 D, 199 R, a swing of about 10 districts to the Republicans. But note that in the 114th House the makeup had been 188 D, 247 R and the map was even redder.

mynameishere 7y ago
GINI coefficient of Republican versus Democratic districts You can get an idea from the states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co... It won't surprise you to reveal that Utah features the greatest amount of economic equality. When you chart Democrats' income it tends to be bimodal--poor people voting for tax money and rich people voting for [insert mystery reasons here--stopping climate change? ethnic interests? to please TV clowns?].
- notacoward 7y ago
  Mostly, the "mystery reason" is that self-interested voting is prevalent only among the needy and the greedy. At one end are those who feel it's necessary for their own survival (even when they're wrong or when the policies they vote for actually harm them). At the other end are the rentiers who never had any guiding principle other than self-interest. In between are the many reasonably-prosperous and mostly-urban folks who can afford to vote their conscience. When the personal effect of a policy ranges from slight benefit to slight harm, in neither case affecting one's basic quality of life or social standing, it becomes a lot easier to vote for policies that one sincerely and logically believes are best in a utilitarian sense.
  - scarface74 7y ago

transfire 7y ago

I wonder how much the lack of high-speed Internet plays into the stagnant economic prosperity of rural America.

inimino 7y ago
Probably not much. It doesn't help, but by the time $60/mo is a lot to pay (for Comcast trash internet no less) you're already hurting.
AdrianB1 7y ago
Not a lot. High-speed Internet is good to have, but it does not make your farm better, productivity higher and product prices higher. You don't "digitally enhance" your manufacturing plant with faster Internet unless the speed of Internet is keeping you from achieving better productivity - most of the time, not the case, plants have all local systems and they use SCADA, not fancy screens or kubernetes.
- PorterDuff 7y ago
  Perhaps the general hope is that we can replace all wealth due to manufacturing, resource extraction, food production, with that produced via internet advertising.
  - AdrianB1 7y ago
    I haven't seen yet anyone eating internet advertising, living in it, heating with it, driving it etc.

pge 7y ago

One major factor that needs to be considered when looking at these data is that the electoral districts (the unit of measure here) were redrawn with significant changes after the 2010 census (taking control of state legislatures in order to redraw the maps to be much more favorable was a key component of Republican strategy). As a result conparing 2008 and 2018 as if those congressional districts were the same may be skewed.

vitus 7y ago
Yeah. I was disappointed to see that there wasn't a comparison between 2011 and 2013 to try to identify how big that effect was. Wikipedia has images that can give a vague idea of the geographic shift (which I like especially because they show which districts flipped in the election). It looks to me that some of the major shifts were independent of gerrymandering (e.g. Dakotas becoming solidly Republican, Dem control solidifying over coastal Pacific and around NYC), while others might have been tied to it (e.g. compaction of Dem control in UT, AL, MS). 2010 election: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/2010_House_elections.svg/400px-2010_House_elections.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/20... 2012 election: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/US_House_2012.svg/400px-US_House_2012.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/US... 2018 election: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/US_House_2018.svg/400px-US_House_2018.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/US...

helpPeople 7y ago

I'm not Republican or Democrat, but I find the Math provided not agreeing with their conclusions. Given more than 60% of tech workers do not identify as Democrat, the conclusions that tech workers are Democrats are silly. I identify with only a few Democrat Candidates and fiscally think Democrats are regressive. That said, Republicans also don't align with my social or economic views. (Tariffs and government spending) If I had to guess why this article exists, they are pressuring people into thinking educated rich people vote Democrat.

viraptor 7y ago
> Given more than 60% of tech workers do not identify as Democrat [citation needed] But for clarity, I'd like to see "identify as X" and "identify as neither". For some numbers which don't agree see https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/6/16260326/tech-entrepreneurs-survey-politics-liberal-regulation-unions https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/6/16260326/te... "They found that, broadly speaking, tech entrepreneurs are pretty liberal. 75.2 percent voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and 61.3 percent identified as Democrats"
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Yeah dude doesn't realize there is the catch all part of independents who make up more registered people than either dem or republican party.

Havoc 7y ago

I suspect this is exactly what makes the Trump-style platforms viable even if they make no real sense.

jstewartmobile 7y ago

All of these think tanks devour money from God-knows-who and shit it out into a "lies, damn lies, and statistics" narrative for God-knows-what-purpose. All I'm reading out of this--in-between the lines of course--is "Booga booga red staters! You're all going down into an abyss of poverty and opioid addiction. Better sell the farm, borrow six figures for a new job credential, prostrate yourself before any corporation that might take you in, move to the city, and spend $2k/month to live in a shoebox" In other words, wall street wants even more tropical mansions.

danmaz74 7y ago

In other words, Trump's Republican party is losing votes in more highly educated districts, which not surprisingly fare better in the information-age economy. Conversely, it gains votes in districts with a lower education.

AdrianB1 7y ago
Are the Republicans "Trump's party" or Trump is just riding the wave?
- PorterDuff 7y ago
  Both? My guess is that the dividing line between 'Red' and 'Blue' is being renegotiated as we speak. The post-WWI political arguments, largely about economics, are being replaced by something new. Trump obviously has a good nose for these matters.

austincheney 7y ago

There are only two charts in that article that matter. The ones on productivity and education. These explain everything else in the article. The article over generalizes on geography. My city is deeply red but it recently passed San Francisco in population and is growing faster in nearly all metrics including jobs, housing, wages, and so forth. I think the article is generally correct in that urban clusters tend to be more blue and rural areas tend to be more red, but that is a product of population density more than anything economically related. Despite my city now having more people than San Francisco it is also growing geographically and can maintain its average density. It is now geographically larger than Dallas. If this rate of growth is maintained this city may enter the top ten of US cities, both area and population, over coming decades and it will probably continue to be a red congressional district. Also, next door is a suburb that is possibly the wealthiest mid-sized city in the country and it’s also in this red district.

ethbro 7y ago

YES. This article clearly answers what I was asking about a month after the presidential election. "Why aren't Democrats trying to answer everyone's problems? And realizing that someone is telling you they have a need if they vote for the other party?" Turns out, politics is in its own filter bubble. Democrats honestly can't relate to rural or manufacturing areas anymore, and Republicans can't relate to urban or technology areas.

throwaway6734 7y ago
> "Why aren't Democrats trying to answer everyone's problems? And realizing that someone is telling you they have a need if they vote for the other party?" Not true in all cases. Particularly look at what is going on with farmers in the midwest voting directly against their economic self interest.
- scarface74 7y ago
  There are cultural interest that they have that supersede any economic interest. I’ll leave it to the reader to make their own inference.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Why is it bad when farmers in the Midwest vote their conscience, against their supposed self interest, but it’s good for rich programmers to vote against their self interest? The Trump tax cuts were good for me—am I obliged to vote for him?
  - throwaway6734 7y ago
    I should have been clearer. Voting against your self interest is not an issue (and can even be admirable). The issue I have is farmers relying on state welfare to stay solvent while they vote against their economic interests.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    His attempts to become an authoritarian and being a Russian puppet however are not good for you. I would say that's against every American's interest. Lower taxes or not. By the way 75% of his tax reductions went to the richest 5% and the middle class tax deductions expire in a few years.

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georgeecollins 7y ago

This article shows that districts that tend to vote democratic are more prosperous, and the gap is growing. However, people who are more prosperous* (income > $200k) tend to vote Republican over all. I can't explain that. If I were going to guess it would be because older people tend to have more wealth and income in America (in general) and older people sku more republican. *https://brandongaille.com/24-interesting-republican-vs-democrat-demographics/ https://brandongaille.com/24-interesting-republican-vs-democ...

bandrami 7y ago
It's mostly gaslighting. Democrats win voters making $50K or less, Republicans win voters making $50K or more. There are a couple of small-ish inversions where Democrats do well with people making $150K-$200K and Republicans do well with people making $35K-$45K, and that gets spun out into all sorts of things it's not. Trump's economic sweet spot, for instance, was $75K. Not coincidentally, that is the median income for a two-earner family of two white high school graduates. But calling that "the working class" really misses the point.
- georgeecollins 7y ago
  I don't think anybody is gaslighting. This report is all about facts, and all I was trying to do was point out another fact. The point remains that republicans are really popular in the places where there is less opportunity. Here is a point I will make that is political: The places that are run by very liberal local governments, such as California and New York have the majority of the growth. I always see these articles about how business and people are fleeing to low tax places. Except the growth continues to swamp that effect.
  - bandrami 7y ago
    > republicans are really popular in the places where there is less opportunity No, I'm saying that's not quite it. There is an income correlation among white voters: the poorer a white voter is, the less likely he was to vote for Trump. It's just a very shallow one with a couple of convex points at a couple of income levels.

tsss 7y ago

> Democratic districts have seen their median household income soar in a decade—from $54,000 in 2008 to $61,000 in 2018. During that decade the US had an inflation rate between 1 and 2%, which is around $5-10k. So really there was no "soaring" at all: democrats barely manage to hold on to their wealth/lifestyle while republicans are continuously losing and worse off than the years before. Everyone in the country is losing except for Jeff Bezos and his caste of rich capitalists who are served by the corrupt politicians of either party.

theNJR 7y ago

This makes me think about the book 'Coming Apart' [0] which was an eye opening read which predicts all of this. As a tech/media person in a democratic costal city, there is a whole other America that, it turns out, I know very little about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)

galangalalgol 7y ago
As a dev from flyover country what was something that surprised you? Getting rid of misconceptions is the sort of glue that could prevent this.

inimino 7y ago

In case anyone was wondering why the level of statistical sophistication on show here would embarrass many an English major, the primary author, Mark Muro, was educated at Harvard and Berkeley, where he was presumably better at English literature than he now is at statistics or statistics-heavy journalism. Here is his CV: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/metro_20160809_markmurocv.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/metro_2... Including this gem from almost a decade ago: “Bill Gates, Not Congress, Has the Solution to Global Warming.” The Avenue, A blog of The New Republic. January 25, 2010. I'm glad that worked out so well for us. Don't miss this: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/08/23/instead-of-bemoaning-wealth-work-make-it-better/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/08/23/instead... Tl;dr: "wealth work" is here to stay, yes it's a "servant economy" but we should just tax and regulate, so that the servants feel better about their jobs walking the dogs of people too rich and lazy to walk their own dogs.

awareBrah 7y ago

It didn’t get mentioned in the article but a huge reason of this over the last 10 years is just the number of people in blue states moving to red states. The migration has been striking, just how many people are leaving NY, California, NJ, Connecticut, etc for places like Texas and Florida. One billionaire left NJ and singlehandedly broke the states budget. I’m amazed that the current field of democratic candidates are what they came up with. It is no question that trump is winning again.

throwaway6734 7y ago
> It didn’t get mentioned in the article but a huge reason of this over the last 10 years is just the number of people in blue states moving to red states. Huge reason for what? Income growth is happening in blue districts not red. > It is no question that trump is winning again. Last I checked he's getting crushed in polls by almost every major dem candidate.
- scarface74 7y ago
  He got crushed in the polls in 2016. He also lost the popular vote. But he could once again easily win the electoral vote and lose the popular vote.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    Due to more gerrymandering I believe he could lose by up to 8 million or so votes and still win because of the electoral college. It's pretty depressing when you think about it.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Gerrymandering doesn’t have anything to do with the presidential elections. Gerrymandering refers to state legislations drawing districts to have an advantage in state and house elections. Electoral college votes are strictly determined by the census.
- 7y ago

nemetroid 7y ago

The charts have a number of issues. With some changes, they can easily show the significance along with the trend itself. I created a new version of figure 2, which fixes some of the issues: https://svgur.com/i/F35.svg https://svgur.com/i/F35.svg [SVG] * Bar charts are preferred when presenting a population of something (people or jobs) * Each Y-axis starts at zero * Charts that (by definition) add up to 100% are shown as stacked * The y-axis max is set to 100% where possible (except in one case, where this obscured the trend) (I couldn't get Google Sheets to make a nice x-axis for the first chart)

chewbacha 7y ago
Thank you! The charts really bothered me and this shows that the article is portraying the trends a little more aggressively than they really are. I still think having only two data points (one during the Great Recession and one in 2018) reeks of cherry picking. I’d like the author to have provided more historical data to demonstrate the effect.
paulsutter 7y ago
Your charts could never get published, they’re just not hyperbolic enough > a series of genuine, penetrating shifts have been happening at warp speed through the last decade. These shifts are massively altering the two parties’ economic identities.
jpster 7y ago
Thank you! And how did you learn these guidelines? Is there a book or blog post you recommend for data visualization best practices?
- kk58 7y ago
  Nathan yau has a great book
- fact_factory 7y ago
  this [0] website and the book [1] it references might interest you: [0] https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-naked/ https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-na... [1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

mystique 7y ago

Are these conclusions correct though? They show the electoral map and the districts that were lost. Those are more rural and more traditional industry focused areas. It is more likely that coastal Democrat's income and education was always higher than rural leaning counties and remained at par between these two time periods. To state that this materially changes the Democratic party is not right.

patientplatypus 7y ago

Just wait until the next economic crash. Every central bank on the planet is more less out of the fire power they had in 2008 to put a bottom to the market. And most major countries now have extremely right wing or tin pot dictators. We're going to see it get nasty. And most indications are saying that it will happen in October. What worries me most is that Trump will just refuse to leave office if he loses the next general election. We found out this week that he was talking to the Ukrainian president to get dirt on Joe Biden (holy shit Batman!). And we also know that odds are he'll be prosecuted for all of his crimes when he leaves office - maybe he just won't. Dark times.

chewbacha 7y ago

I stopped reading when figure one showed only two data points on a chart without zero based y-axis. It portrays a divergence that -looks- like a multi factor difference, but is only a 20% at most divergence. This coupled without historical comparison for normal variance and the repeated use of excited adjectives, makes for an alarmist article.

echelon 7y ago

Something this article doesn't specifically call out is age. Anecdotally, it seems that the upcoming generations are more liberal than the last, and that the older population is simply dying off. Perhaps someone can cite direct evidence of this?

fauigerzigerk 7y ago
I agree. The article is generally lacking demographic data. Are younger, better educated, more productive people moving from red to blue districts? Is the share of the population living in the red districts shrinking? There are a lot of open questions.

bensonn 7y ago

“Blue” territories have seen their productivity climb from $118,000 per worker in 2008 to $139,000 in 2018. Republican-district productivity, by contrast, remains stuck at about $110,000. How is productivity measured? I have wondered about this stat as I have seen it used many times over the years but I can't figure out what and how they are measuring or who is doing the measuring. Take Weyerhaeuser as an example- they own 26 million acres of land across North America, have 10,000 employees and 7+ billion in revenue. Recently their corporate headquarters moved to Seattle. Is their 7 billion in revenue spread across all the loggers, drivers and mill workers in remote forest locations? Boeing is another example with headquarters in Chicago but as far as I know they don't make any planes in Chicago. Are these stats pulled from census, irs, labor...? Am I wrong or cynical in thinking these are lazy stats and most of the "productivity" is attributed to the small percentage of employees in the corporate HQs? I can't imagine a fed bean-counter following around logging trucks in remote areas to make sure the productivity is attributed to the correct region.

beefman 7y ago
Productivity is measured by dividing GDP by total hours worked, with the assumptions that GDP is caused by work and that the relationship is linear. The latter assumption is false and the former is highly suspect. You raise a good question about localization of GDP. The global economy is a highly-connected network. It's often unclear how to draw valid conclusions from national accounts, let alone the local accounting attempted here. That said, I think there most likely is a trend of the kind imagined by the authors and that it's showing up in these figures. Showing up is the most it's doing though.

_edo 7y ago

I would really enjoy seeing an article like this paired with analysis from somebody with the same education level but from the University of Chicago economics department or something like that. They'd probably tell two very different stories. A few things that jumped out at me: Two of the sectors where the author is touting gains for Democrats both have significant left-leaning bias: academia and tech. How does that play into this? Democrats are getting more college degrees now, but which degrees? Why start so many graphs of Democrats doing better than Republicans in 2008 when we had a big recession and a new president who didn't prioritize rural America? Why not go back to 2000 or 1990 so we can get a bigger picture? And pardon my ignorance, but "GDP per seat"? And why is this graph next to Median household income? Are they saying that the changes in median household income are causing "GDP per seat" to rise? Urban populations have changed a lot in the past 10 years, are we even talking about the same households? Household income statistics are prone to distortions[0], GDP per seat is probably prone to even more, why not use GDP per capita? It feels like they were just happy to find two graphs where the Democrat line went up and the Republican line went down and they know most people will just glance at the graph without wasting their morning thinking about what GDP per seat really means and how it's affected by the population flows of the past decade. [0] - https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/09/16/misleading-statistics https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/09/16/misleading...

agsilvio 7y ago

I stopped reading at "low-skill".

PorterDuff 7y ago
lol. Good point. I would like to see everyone's list on what a 'skill' really means. It would make a good basis for a discussion. a quick edit: It's a question that really began gnawing at my mind over the last few minutes. What is a skill? To tell you the (highly likely) truth, I could probably take on the jobs the authors hold and do a perfectly acceptable professional job given a desk, a library, a phone, a web browser, and a five minute head start. Are they 'skilled'?

Bubbadoo 7y ago

Given much of the economic growth is in tech and tech tends to concentrate in urban centers, urban centers tend to be blue. Can this be much of a surprise? The Administration's self-promoted gains in manufacturing and mining are impaired by some of that technology. Automation has played huge roles in the very industries Trump heralded for his voter base in 2016. You no longer need an army of humans on the production floor or even in the coal mine, making those, formerly high-paying jobs, a thing of the past. This leaves an entire population of disenfranchised to whom immigrants are a major threat as is outsourcing. So these numbers and graphs should not be a surprise to anyone.