Made in America

Forbes has an interactive map of manufacturing in the United States:



Each of 369 metropolitan statistical areas in the US are represented by a pushpin; darker blue means a higher percentage of workers in manufacturing. Clicking on the pins will reveal the top five manufacturing industries by employment in a given metro area, like yea:



Says Forbes, of the map:

Patterns emerge. Some are expected (timber is big in the Pacific Northwest; cheese dominates Green Bay, Wisc., and auto manufacturing is the top industry in Detroit). Others reveal a shift in American manufacturing toward more lucrative high-tech products.

The steel industry, once a mainstay of the American economy, is now a top-five manufacturing employer in only seven U.S. metro areas. Pharmaceutical-related manufacturing, a dominant employer in 17 metro areas, is now the top industry in the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, once home to one of the country’s largest steel plants. The semiconductor industry is among the top five manufacturing employers in 14 areas, Allentown among them.

And they still build ships in New Orleans. I did not know that!

The Uneven Geography of Incarceration

The Atlantic maps a phenomenon of displacement in New Orleans that's wholly unrelated to the aftermath of Katrina.



The map shows the residences of people who entered prison in 2007, and the cost of housing prisoners over their entire sentence by block. Says the Atlantic:

Nationwide, an estimated two-thirds of the people who leave prison are rearrested within three years. A disproportionate number of them come from a few urban neighborhoods in big cities. Many states spend more than $1 million a year to incarcerate the residents of single blocks or small neighborhoods.

One such “million-dollar neighborhood” is shown above—a half-square-mile portion of Central City, an impoverished district southwest of the French Quarter. In 2007, 55 people from this neighborhood entered prison; the cost of their incarceration will likely reach about $2 million.

The Columbia Spatial Information Design Lab has a similar graphic for Brooklyn:



Given the heavy concentrations of prisoners in these neighborhoods, it seems that a relatively small amount of investment targeted at these places might be able to break the vicious cycle of crime, incarceration and community disruption. And indeed, says the Atlantic, that's just what some people are arguing:

Some New Orleans officials and community groups are now using prison-admission maps like these to explore new investments—block by block—in the social infrastructure of these damaged neighborhoods. Plenty of money is already being spent on these neighborhoods, in the form of policing and prison costs; the hope is that by spending more money in them, in a highly targeted fashion, the release-and-return-to-prison cycle can eventually be broken.

Taking a preventive rather than reactive approach to problems is not exactly a classic American virtue. Here's to hoping it works.