Human Development and the US-Mexico Border

Andrew Sullivan links to a map from the 2009 Human Development Report, which uses HDI, the Human Development Index, as a measure of the general level of development for jurisdictions on both sides of the US-Mexico border:



As Steven Taylor notes:

What is interesting is that the lowest HDI county on the US side (Starr County Texas) is higher than the highest HDI municipality in Mexico (i.e., Mexicali).

This is, of course, likely not a shock to anyone paying even a modicum of attention to the situation. Still, it continues to underscore that fundamental aspect of this situation: it is the disparity of wealth between the two countries that continues to create the synergy of migration over the border. As I keep saying: any policy that ignores this fact will fail. As such, calls for massive deportations or that assumes it is possible to stop migration over the border is naught more than fantasy. “Seal the border!” is a slogan, not a viable policy.

That's true. It also points up what ought to be an obvious truth about immigration from Mexico and other relatively poor countries to the United States: it is comprised mostly of individuals who are driven by lack of economic opportunity to leave their homeland in order to exchange their labor for money. That many people feel so threatened by this class of people, which is already among the most powerless in society, has always baffled me.

Also: as long-time readers of this blog know, I like nothing better than using HDI for various countries as a frame of reference for apprehending the significance of HDI ratings for various sub-national jurisdictions! And so, here are selected HDI-comparable nations (based on this table (pdf) from the same organization) for each of the five HDI ranges indicated on the map (with countries listed in ascending order of HDI):

.636-.700 - Morocco, Botswana, South Africa, Tajikistan, Vanuatu, Kyrgyzstan, Guatemala, Nicaragua

.701-.765 - Uzbekistan, Honduras, Egypt, Vietnam, Mongolia, Bolivia, Indonesia, Philippines, El Salvador, Algeria, China, Georgia

.766-.830 - Dominican Republic, Jordan, Belize, Tonga, Ukraine, Thailand, Peru, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Serbia, Malaysia, Venezuela

.831-.895 - Panama, Bulgaria, Oman, Mexico, Costa Rica, Cuba, Argentina, Lithuania, Chile, Hungary, Malta

.896-.950 - Czech Republic, Portugal, UAE, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Israel, Germany, UK, Italy, Belgium, United States

Satisfaction

Gallup asked some people how satisfied they were with their standard of living, which yielded this result:



Says Gallup:

The 2009 satisfaction results are based on combined data for Gallup Daily tracking from Jan. 2 through Dec. 30, 2009, including more than 350,000 interviews for the entire year. The state sample sizes range from 632 in the District of Columbia and 878 in Wyoming to 37,203 in California. Forty-one states had more than 2,000 respondents...

Overall, 31 states showed an increase in satisfaction of at least one percentage point between 2008 and 2009, whereas 5 showed a decrease of at least one point (the greatest decrease, Hawaii's, was less than four points.) The remaining 14 states plus the District of Columbia changed by less than one point.

Now that just doesn't make any sense. Obviously things went downhill from 2008 to '09. Don't people know that? Don't they realize they must be less satisfied now than they were a year ago? Or is it that lean times make people feel more fortunate about their relative prosperity? After all, even now more than four-fifths of people who want jobs have them. That's 80% of the country that probably realizes they could be worse off than they are.

At any rate, it's interesting that the most satisfied states seem to be those that have been least affected by the recession, rather than the ones that have the highest standard of living. And for the least satisfied states it's the same deal: they don't have the lowest objective standards of living, but they have been hard hit by the current recession. I take this to mean that satisfaction, in this context, correlates with perceptions of change in economic conditions, rather than economic conditions as such. (Which makes some sense: if you have a net worth of $1,000, and you find a hundred dollar bill on the street, you'll probably feel a lot more satisfied than someone who's got $10,000 in the bank, but just lost $50,000 at the craps table in Vegas (Nevada, by the way, is the least satisfied state in the country).)

But overall there's not a real huge range from least to most satisfied. Nevada, like I say, is the least satisfied, but 69% there still express satisfaction with their standard of living. The most satisfied is North Dakota, at 82.3%, followed by South Dakots, at 80.8%. (The Dakotas, by the way, are the two ugliest states in the country as well. The reader may make of that what she will.)

BONUS FUN FACT: Did you know the Rolling Stones' (Can't Get No) Satisfation is only the third-best version of that song? It's true! Here's the best:

Metro Monitor Maps

The Brookings Institution does this thing called a Metro Monitor. It monitors metros, economics-wise, and it comes with some maps. This one shows overall performance:



It's based on four factors: "employment change from peak; unemployment rate change from one year ago; gross metropolitan product change from peak; and housing price index change from one year ago."

This one shows employment change. It explains itself:



And this one just shows straight-up unemployment:



Says the accompanying report:

Nationwide, the recession is over—at least in the view of most economists in light of third quarter 2009 indicators. They revealed a real U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) increasing at a 2.8 percent annual rate, after four consecutive quarters of contraction. Most interpreted that rate of output growth, along with other signals such as increasing housing prices, as indication that the economic recovery is underway.

Yet the recovery seems fragile. The output increase may have resulted largely from the replenishment of manufacturing inventories and from temporary federal policies: the “cash-for-clunkers” program (already over), the first-time homebuyer tax credit (now extended through April 2010), and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s economic stimulus. As the effects of these policies recede, the recovery could slow or give way to yet another recession or a prolonged period of economic stagnation.

Real recovery in the labor market, moreover, remains elusive. Although output grew between July and September of 2009, the total number of U.S. jobs continued to decline. Payroll employment dropped by about 600,000 during the third quarter (about half the decline of the previous quarter), and the unemployment rate climbed to 9.8 percent by September. While the most recent national-level report showed a significant slowing of job losses in November, and a slight downtick in unemployment, the national economy still seems a long way from posting the sustained job gains that would meaningfully lower unemployment and boost incomes.

I'll be honest: this article seemed kind of boring so I didn't really read it. I assume it said what we all know - the economy blows and there aren't enough jobs. But it did helpfully put a few points in bold, so we can skip right to those:

• Metro areas continued to register highly disparate economic performance even as the nation showed early signs of recovery.
• Six metro areas—Albuquerque, Austin, McAllen, San Antonio, Virginia Beach, and Washington, DC—had regained their pre-recession peak level of output by the third quarter.
• Recovery seemed to be underway in most metro areas, but job growth remained spotty.
• The first-time homebuyer tax credit appeared to boost economic growth in nearly all metro areas.
• The “cash-for-clunkers” program boosted economic growth in most metro areas, and probably accounted for the improved rankings of auto production-specialized metro areas.[By the way, it is the official economic analysis of The Map Scroll that the government's efforts to continue to encourage home and car buying is propping up a failed economic model and merely delaying the inevitable transition to a non car-and-sprawl based economy while squandering tax dollars in the process. Our qualifications for making this analysis are various and broad.]
• The rate of metropolitan job losses in construction, manufacturing, and administrative services slowed considerably in the third quarter.
• Home prices stabilized or grew in an increasing number of metro areas, but inventories of real estate-owned properties (REOs) continued to mount overall.

This report is from December. The next update will come out in March, and it will probably show improvement, though according to Paul Krugman, there's a strong danger of the economy taking another brody later in 2010. We'll see. In the meantime, So long, Florida, and thanks for all the fish!

Yikes

Let's check in on the old unemployment picture, shall we?



Oh dear. Not good at all.

Via Mike Lux, the map is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (It can be found here (pdf). Says Lux:

If full employment is defined as four percent, then only nine counties east of the Mississippi River that fit that definition. Two counties west of the Rocky Mountains qualify; one in eastern Washington State and the other covers the North Slope of Alaska.

The bright spots of full employment can be found in the agricultural counties of the Great Plains. Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas seem immune to the wave of persistent joblessness, at least for now.

And this is just average annual employment. Things are worse now, with unemployment having climbed to 9.8%. Nor does it count those who are underemployed or who have dropped out of the labor force altogether; if it did, the national number would stand at nearly 20%, according to Lux.

Curiously, not having a McDonalds nearby seems to correlate with low unemployment. Clearly McDonaldses cause people to lose jobs!

"Where the Buffalo Roamed"

I can't improve on the blog post title from Stephen Von Worley, who maps the US by distance to the nearest McDonalds:



We here at the Map Scroll would also like to endorse the ironic detachment of Von Worley's post - such a mood being really the only way to cope with the bombardment of consumerist waste the US landscape has endured over the course of the last 60-odd years - which begins thus:

This summer, cruising down the I-5 through California’s Central Valley to the Los Angeles Basin, I unwittingly stumbled upon a most exasperating development: the country strip mall. First, let me state that I don’t hate. I’ve got nothing against Petco, Starbucks, OfficeMax, et al. When overcome by the desire for a cubic yard of kitty litter, a carafe of pre-Columbian frappasmoochino, or fifty gross of pink highlighter pens, I’m there in a jiffy!

But, Mr. Real Estate Tycoon, did you have to plop your shopping center smack dab in the middle of what was previously nowhere? Okay, the land was cheap. And yes, you did traffic studies and proved that the interstate and distant suburbs would drench whatever you built in a raging torrent of eager consumerism. But your retail monstrosity drains the wildness from the countryside for twenty miles in every direction! Sure, you can’t see it from everywhere - but once you know it’s there, you feel it. In the rural drawl of a neighboring rancher, that flat-out sucks!

Which begs the question: just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?

He got data on the locations of all 13,000 McDonald'ses in the lower 48, applied some "technical know-how," as the kids call it, and made this map. As you can see, there's really no escaping the Gilded Parabolas in the eastern half of the country. There are, though, a few pockets in the West where the hegemony of the arches needn't weigh quite so heavily on the spirit:

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota. There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer.

Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

I'm totally moving to Spearfish.

Via Felix Salmon.

Job Prospects in the 50 Biggest US Cities

Via Matt Yglesias (via Ryan Avent), an interactive map of job listings per capita for US cities:



Washington, DC has far and away the most job listings - more than 132 per 1000 people. And Baltimore easily takes second, with more than 90. As Yglesias notes, "the metro DC economy is in better-than-average shape and I think that may have a distorting influence on how the hill and the press are seeing the national economic picture which continues to be very bleak despite the fact that the financial panic has ameliorated." The media centers of the US, however, aren't doing nearly so well: New York has less than 28 job listings per 1000 people, and LA has less than 24.

The techie cities of San Jose, Seattle, and Austin are all doing relatively well; the Rust Belt not so much - of Midwestern cities, only Milwaukee has more than 40 jp/k, and Detroit has the fewest of any city: less than 15. Miami is in second-worst shape, with just over 17. The full ranking of the 50 metros are listed with the map here.

Bubbletowns

I've looked at this topic before, but this post by Richard Florida has a nice map, made by Scott Pennington, that shows the unevenness of the housing bubble across the metropolitan areas of the US:



The big cities of the East Coast, Florida, and the West in general had, to use a Greenspanism, the most "froth." But a number of regions were substantially spared from the housing bubble, especially places that most people don't want to live - the Rust Belt, smaller cities in the South, Texas... Actually, a lot of people want to live in Texas; it's one of the fastest growing states - a classic Sun Belt economy - so I'm not sure why it was one of the regions least affected by the housing bubble (with the moderate exception of Austin).

Note that this map uses housing price-to-wage ration, rather than the more common housing price-to-income ratio. Says Florida:

The housing price-to-wage ratio may provide a better gauge of housing bubbles. Income is a broad measure that includes wealth from stocks and bonds, interests, rents, and government transfers and other sources. Wages constitute a more appropriate gauge of a region's underlying productivity, accounting for remuneration for work actually performed.

Some of the results:

The housing-to-wage ratio also generates a number of surprises. Greater New York's ratio (9.4) was slightly higher than Las Vegas (9), and Greater DC..'s (8.7) slightly bested Miami (8.4). Boston (8.1) and Seattle (7.6) topped Phoenix (7.2). Chicago's (5.9) was higher than Tampa (5.6) or Myrtle Beach (5.5).

What regions seem to have avoided the bubble? The cream of the crop on the housing-to-wage ratio are Dallas (3.5), Houston (3.2), Pittsburgh (3), and Buffalo (2.8).

So yeah, if you wanted to avoid the worst of the housing bubble, you would have done well to locate in either the negative-growth Rust Belt, or the rapidly growing big cities of Texas. Color me mystified.

Balances of Trade Since 1980

Whilst perusing the interwebs on HPI-related matters, I came across this Wikipedia map of cumulative current account balances from 1980 to 2008, based on IMF data:



This map indicates, more or less, the trade surplus or deficit for countries since 1980, in billions of dollars.

According to this, the top five net exporters since 1980 have been

1. Japan: 2,747.943 billion dollars US
2. China: 1,521.887
3. Germany: 1,047.328
4. Russia: 613.978
5. Switzerland: 596.977

The top five net importers have been

1. United States: -7,335.869
2. Spain: -773.443
3. United Kingdom: -695.155
4. Australia: -529.031
5. Mexico: -263.667

For 2007, the top twenty country net exporters included 6 European countries, 6 East Asian countries, and 8 members of OPEC. The top 16 net importers included 11 European countries (including Turkey) and 6 countries with a history of British colonization. But note that Ireland gets counted twice.

More on the Happy Planet Index

As promised, here's more on the Happy Planet Index. This is from their map of Europe (note that it uses a different scale than the world map for the sake of intra-regional comparison):



Note that the European HPI is calculated differently than the world HPI: the Euro version uses carbon footprint as the denominator in the index, whereas the global HPI uses overal ecological footprint (details here). (And can I make a modest suggestion to the folks at the New Economics Foundation? If you have two indexes - one for Europe and another for the world - that don't use the same variables, perhaps you shouldn't use the same name for those two indexes.) As is just about always the case, the Scandinavians lead the way, followed by Italy, Spain, and a few others. (Presumably they aren't leaders in a global sense, though; Europe, though thriftier than the US, still consumes a lot by global standards.)

Now back to the global HPI. As I mentioned in the previous post, I like the concept behind this index. As with the Human Development Index, it seeks to take a broader measure of well-being than can be obtained by simply looking at cumulative economic activity. In particular, it assigns a value to ecosystems and the life of the planet which, being that which sustains us, is of some importance. Another way to put this is that the HPI is an economic indicator which incorporates certain external costs - the costs of economic activity which are not paid by those directly involved in a given transaction. Economists - especially those legions that have come out of the University of Chicago - for some reason tend to be incredibly myopic about such things. I don't know why; I guess they find mathematical models more elegant than the real world, with all its knotty complications, but those models don't do so well at taking into account the big picture - the social and environmental consequences of economic activity.

So I appreciate the effort here. But at first glance some of the results seemed counter-intuitive, e.g., the "happiest planet" countries being located in Central America. As a commenter said in the previous post, "The real question is Mexico. American companies move to Mexico to avoid our environmental laws, most Mexicans are quite poor, and while the government isn't necessarily mistreating them, drug cartels evidently are, but Mexico is ecologically efficient?" My concerns were along similar lines - it seems that these countries are subject to considerable ecological exploitation. But actually, the HPI accounts for this in their measure of ecological footprint:

The ecological footprint measures how much land area is required to sustain a given population at present levels of consumption, technological development and resource efficiency, and is expressed in global-average hectares (gha). The largest component elements of Footprint are the land used to grow food, trees and biofuels, areas of ocean used for fishing, and ­ most importantly ­ the land required to support the plant life needed to absorb and sequester CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.

Footprint takes account of the fact that in a global economy people consume resources and ecological services from all over the world. Therefore, a Chiquita plantation in Costa Rica will not count towards Costa Rica’s Footprint, but rather towards the Footprint of those countries where the bananas are consumed. For this reason, a country’s Footprint can be significantly larger than its actual biocapacity. The Footprint of a country is thus best understood as a measure of its consumption, and its worldwide environmental impact.

That seems sensible. And it helps to explain the situation for countries like Mexico, where the ecological costs of a lot of industrial and agricultural activity are borne by the US and Canada (as far as the HPI is concerned, at least!), Mexico's NAFTA buddies which are the destination for the lion's share of Mexican goods. But this means that the maps of HPI aren't reflective of the ecological health or sustainability of practices in a country; they're more like a measure of countries' responsibility for ecological costs (which in the real world may often be borne in countries with some of the highest HPI scores).

And for all that, most of the low-consuming countries of Africa still score very low on the HPI:



Not only do they not consume much, their consumption contributes disproportionately little to their life expectancy and well-being.

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!

Foreclosures and Race

The New York Times has a map of foreclosures in the New York City area, with details down to the level of city blocks.



It's a very uneven pattern, and a pattern that closely follows of the distribution of minority neighborhoods in the region. Says the Times:

But the storm has fallen with a special ferocity on black and Latino homeowners, the analysis shows. Defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones. Eighty-five percent of the worst-hit neighborhoods — where the default rate is at least double the regional average — have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.

And the hardest blows rain down on the backbone of minority neighborhoods: the black middle class. In New York City, for example, black households making more than $68,000 a year are almost five times as likely to hold high-interest subprime mortgages as are whites of similar — or even lower — incomes.

This holds a special poignancy. Just four or five years ago, black homeownership was rising sharply, after decades in which discriminatory lending and zoning practices discouraged many blacks from buying. Now, as damage ripples outward, black families in foreclosure lose savings and credit, neighbors see the value of their homes decline, and renters are evicted.

That pattern plays out across the nation. A study released this week by the Pew Research Center also shows foreclosure taking the heaviest toll on counties that have black and Latino majorities, with the New York region among the badly hit.

This is especially tragic considering the history of redlining in urban minority neighborhoods. Redlining was the practice of denying access to services, including mortgages, to residents of minority communities, and it was practiced in cities across the US. Here's a redlined map of Philadelphia from Wikipedia:



Give you a buck if you can figure out what the euphemisms in the legend mean... This is the very definition of institutional racism (and it is, by the way, the sort of thing that needs pointing to when people argue that one's position in life is entirely the product of their own effort and moral virtue, rather than any contingent facts about their background or race). Redlining as such no longer exists, but the now infamous sub-prime loans were in some ways predatory on minority neighborhoods in a way that was disconcertingly reminiscent of the old segregation-era practices. As the Times says:

Black buyers often enter a separate lending universe: A dozen banks and mortgage companies, almost all of which turned big profits making subprime loans, accounted for half the loans given to the region’s black middle-income borrowers in 2005 and 2006, according to The Times’s analysis. The N.A.A.C.P. has filed a class-action suit against many of the nation’s largest banks, charging that such lending practices amount to reverse redlining.

“This was not only a problem of regulation on the mortgage front, but also a targeted scourge on minority communities,” said Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, in a speech this year at New York University. Roughly 33 percent of the subprime mortgages given out in New York City in 2007, Mr. Donovan said, went to borrowers with credit scores that should have qualified them for conventional prevailing-rate loans.

For anyone taking out a $350,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — a typical spread between conventional and subprime loans — tacks on $272,000 in additional interest over the life of a 30-year loan.

“There’s a huge worry that this will exacerbate historic disparities between the wealth of black and white families,” said Ingrid Ellen, co-director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.

But at least the article ends on a happy note:

But few in 1965 would have predicted the South Bronx devastation of 1979. At the very least, tens of thousands of people will lose their homes, their savings and their dreams.

“Rather than helping to narrow the wealth and home ownership gap between black and white,” Mr. Grannum said, “we’ve managed in the last few years to strip a lot of equity out of black neighborhoods.”

I suckered you, didn't I? That's not a happy ending at all. Well, now you know how it feels. Except not really.

IMF Maps GDP Based on WEO

The IMF has a nice interactive map showing economic growth around the world. This image shows projections for 2010:



They project global growth next year of 1.9%. The graph breaks it down into emerging and developing economies (blue) and advanced economies (red(dish)), with overall world numbers indicated by the gray line. The numbers come from their comprehensive World Economic Outlook, which you can findhere.

Singapore's Straits

Via Passport, a Foreign Policy blog, a Google Earth map showing the pile-up of cargo ships bobbing idly outside of Singapore.



It's a sign of the global economic times:

The world's busiest port for container traffic, Singapore saw its year-over-year volume drop by 19.6 percent in January 2009, followed by a 19.8 percent drop in February. As of mid-March 2009, 11.3 percent of the world's shipping capacity, sat idle, a record.

It's obviously a bad time to be a tiny city-state with few natural resources that's pretty much entirely dependent on trade for economic well-being:

The IMF projects that Singapore's economy will shrink significantly in 2009. Globally, bulk shipping rates have dropped more than 80 percent in the past year on weak demand, and orders for new shipping vessels are cratering. In Busan, South Korea, the fifth-largest port in the world, empty shipping containers are piling up faster than officials can manage.

If you want to follow cargo ships around the world in a nifty Google Earth app, go to vesseltracker.com.

Is Part of China in the First World?

I'm just gonna keep on keeping on with this intranational HDI comparison kick. Today: China!



There's obviously a huge range in the development levels between the different provinces of China; I'm guessing it's the greatest range in the world, with some areas comparable to European countries like Portugal or the Czech Republic, and peripheral provinces that are more similar to come countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Here's the list of administrative divisions, helpfully pre-compiled by Wikipedia, with the nation with the most similar HDI in parentheses (note that the Chinese numbers are from 2005, and numbers for countries are from 2006):

1. Hong Kong - .938 (Germany)
2. Shanghai - .913 (Kuwait)
3. Macau - .909 (Cyprus)
4. Beijing - .897 (Czech Republic)
5. Tianjin - .877 (Hungary)
6. Zhejiang - .831 (Panama)
7. Jiangsu - .821 (Serbia)
8. Guangdong - .820 (Saint Lucia)
9. Liaoning - .814 (Belarus)
10. Shandong - .797 (Dominica, or Mississippi)
11. Heilongjiang - .786 (Thailand)
12. Fujian - .786 (Ukraine)
13. Jilin - .780 (Armenia)
14. Hebei - .779 (Iran)
China - .777
15. Shanxi - .775 (Tonga)
16. Inner Mongolia - .765 (St. Vincent and the Grenadines)
17. Hainan - .762 (Tunisia)
18. Henan - .758 (Azerbaijan)
19. Chongqing - .756 (Azerbaijan)
20. Hubei - .755 (Paraguay)
21. Hunan - .752 (Paraguay)
22. Xinjiang - .744 (Philippines)
23. Shaanxi - .742 (Sri Lanka)
24. Guangxi - .741 (Sri Lanka)
25. Jiangxi - .735 (Syria)
26. Sichuan - .728 (Turkmenistan)
27. Ningxia - .724 (Guyana)
28. Anhui - .723 (Bolivia)
29. Qinghai - .685 (Vanuatu)
30. Gansu - .681 (Tajikistan)
31. Yunnan - .672 (South Africa)
32. Guizhou - .647 (Morocco)
33. Tibet - .616 (Congo)

The top nine administrative divisions would all be considered to have a high level of human development - an HDI above .800; they're concentrated along the coast. A second tier of provinces is concentrated in the near interior; it runs from Heilongjiang in the northeast down through Hunan and Chongqing in the south. The deep interior and the far south are China's least developed regions, and the more or less colonized region of Tibet is the least developed of all. Of course, all the provinces of China are developing rapidly. In 1975, the country as a whole had an HDI of .523, comparable to Haiti or Bangladesh today. Even as recently as 2000, its HDI was just .721 (comparable to Mongolia). And now it's closing in on .800, which would officially give it high development status, according to this metric. It will be interesting to see to what extent China is able to spread the wealth around and bring all of its provinces along as it continues to make development gains. If the lessons of the US are worth anything, then China may find that historical patterns of uneven development can have a very long legacy indeed.

Is Part of Italy in the Third World?

I wanted to see if other wealthy countries were similar to the US in having a region within their borders that doesn't really live up to the standards of human development that are generally found in the developed world. Italy has the 19th highest HDI score in the world, slightly below that of the US; but like the United States, it's known for the discrepancy between its wealthy and industrialized North and its poorer and more agrarian South. So I looked at the human development index scores of the regions of Italy, found in this paper (pdf); here's what they show.



Here are the specific HDI values.

Piedmont - .919
Emilia Romagna - .910
Marches - .909
Latium - .907
Tuscany - .907
Friuli Venezia Giulia - .906
Valle d'Aosta - .905
Liguria - .904
Umbria - .902
Lombardy - .901
Veneto - .901
Abruzzo - .900
Trentino Alto Adige - .896
Molise - .894
Basilicata - .883
Sardinia - .881
Calabria - .872
Apulia - .868
Sicily - .864
Campania - .857

Now, there's a bit of a complication here. For reasons I can't figure out, the authors of this paper are using HDI numbers for regions that would imply an overall HDI for Italy far below its "official" HDI (in 2006) of .945. So if anything, this data must be understating the level of development in Italian regions, relative to the numbers I used for US states. Nonetheless, the numbers are still useful for showing the relative levels of development of the regions of Italy. And even if these (evidently low) HDI numbers are taken at face value, it's clear that the variance between Italian regions is far less than that between states in the US, where the range is between .799 for Mississippi and .962 for Connecticut - a spread of .163. In Italy, the difference between Campania (.857) and Piedmont (.919) is only .062.

Furthermore, no region in Italy is close to as underdeveloped as the states of the underdeveloped core of the US. Again, even comparing these apparently low numbers to other countries finds that the least developed region of Italy - Campania - is comparable Uruguay or Cuba, above countries like Mexico and Bulgaria, and well above the underdeveloped core of the US, the top HDI of which goes to Kentucky, at .820. And of course if the Italian numbers were projected upward to fall in line with an overall Italian HDI of .945, even Campania would be at or near .900 - comarable to Portugal or the Czech Republic and completely leaving the underdeveloped core of the US South in the dust.

In short: no, part of Italy is not in the Third World.

(By the way, that paper documents that the north, which generally has the highest per capita GDPs in Italy, slips a bit, and the central regions improve, when you look at HDI. For example, Valle d'Aosta, Trentino Alto Adige, and Lombardy have the three highest per capita GDPs, but are only ranked 6th, 13th, and 9th, respectively, among Italian regions in terms of HDI; whereas Marches and Tuscany, ranked 11th and 10th in terms of GDP, jump to 2nd and 3rd in terms of HDI.)

The Weird Politics of the Underdeveloped South

That map of states by human development index score reminded me of something. Remember this New York Times map of voting shifts from 2004 to 2008?



The bluer counties shifted more towards the Democrats in the presidential elections from 2004 to 2008, and red counties shifted more towards the Republicans. The country as a whole shifted about 9.7% more Democratic; but one region stands out for having a lot of counties that actually went more Republican in 2008 - and it sure looks like it correlates pretty strongly with what I described yesterday as the underdeveloped core: the eight states with human development index scores well outside the mainstream for other developed economies. Those states all went for John McCain in 2008, just like they all went for Bush in 2004 and 2000 (though Bill Clinton did pretty well in the region in his two elections). They're not the most Republican states (though Oklahoma's close to the top of that list), but they all seem to be moving towards the Republicans, even as most of the rest of the country moves toward the Democrats.

If anything, this correlation is even more striking when you make the apples-to-apples comparison of state HDI vs. state voting shift from 2004 to 2008.



This shows the voting shift towards the Democrats from 2004 to 2008. The scale is set so that red states shifted less toward the Democrats than the nation as a whole (even though most of them shifted somewhat toward the Democrats) and blue states shifted more toward the Democrats than the nation as a whole. Again, the vote shift in the underdeveloped core was less toward the Democrats than in any other region; five of the 8 states actually shifted toward the Republicans - the only states to do so. Based on Dave Leip's US Election Atlas, here are the states that moved the least toward the Democrats, with their percentage change in the Democratic margin:

1. Arkansas, -10.09
2. Louisiana, -4.12
3. Tennessee, -0.79
4. West Virginia, -0.25
5. Oklahoma, -0.15
6. Massachusetts, +0.65
7. Arizona, +1.99
8. Kentucky, +3.64
9. Alaska, +4.01
10. Alabama, +4.04
11. Mississippi, +6.52

Massachusetts was the home state of the Democrat in 2004, and Arizona and Alaska were the home states of the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates in 2008. If you take out those three states, the top 8 states that shifted the least toward the Democrats were precisely those eight states that constitute the underdeveloped core. Does that seem like an odd correlation to you? The states that seem to be moving towards the Republicans are exactly those that have the lowest human development index scores.

One possible explanation for this would hold if Republicans were generally increasing their vote share among poorer people: if that were so, it would be most evident in the poorest states. But according to this compilation of exit poll data, that's not the case; lower income voters moved about as much toward the Democrats as the country as a whole.

Other people have explained the relatively strong Republican showing in this region as a phenomenon of Appalachia or the Upland South. But that doesn't account for the pattern of voting shifts in the Deep South. Some moron also argued that the areas of Republican improvement in 2008 should best be conceptualized as those parts of the South where there are few blacks. But that wouldn't account for the fact that Republicans did well relative to 2004 in some states with lots of blacks, like Louisiana and Mississippi, and not as well in some other states with large black populations, like Georgia and North Carolina. The pattern of areas of relative Republican improvement and the states with very low HDI scores makes for a much tidier correlation.

This is a bit hard to figure out. I mean, it's not like the Republicans are avowedly interested in addressing poverty or issues of human development in any direct way. And it's not as if they're popular among lower income people. Yet here they are making inroads in the one region of the country where levels of human development diverge widely from the norms of the developed world. The only explanation I can think of is that, in areas with lower levels of human development, traditionalist values have a firmer hold, and Republican appeals to those values have been paying off in the underdeveloped South. But it still seems odd that such values would swamp material concerns for voters in the one region of the country where the material standard of living really isn't up to snuff.

Is Part of the United States in the Third World?

EDIT WITH HUGE DISCLAIMER: The US HDI is not at all comparable to the world HDI. The data which this map represent are not, in fact based on the American Human Development Project; and the AHDP's data are not, in fact, suitable for making international comparisons - they were specifically designed with the American context in mind. So consider this a sort of interesting thought exercise, but go to the AHDP's website for the real data. They also have some very nice maps of their own.
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A little while ago I asked if the United States was becoming a third world country. The purpose of that post was to point out that the US had rates of income inequality that were totally out of line with other developed countries, but would have been typical for countries in the developing world.

But there's a much more direct measure of the actual level of development of a country: the human development index. The HDI combines measures of various social indicators, including life expectancy, literacy, education, and per capita GDP, to measure overall human development, which "refers to the process of widening the options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education, health care, income, employment, etc." By this measure, the United States ranks rather high - 15th out of all countries, with an HDI of .950, according to this table, which is based on 2006 data. But the HDI of individual states varies quite a bit. Here is a map from Wikipedia of states by their human development index score:



This map is based on numbers from this table, which come from the American Human Development Report. It gives a good sense of regional patterns of human development in the US and the comparative relationship of states to each other. But the numbers in the abstract don't tell us much; to see what these numbers mean, we need to compare them to other countries. And when we do that, we see that the HDI of many states are comparable to some of the most developed countries in the world. However, other states have HDI scores well outside the range of the developed economies of Europe and Asia.

To illustrate the point, I am now going to make a long list. These are the 76 top countries ranked by human development index score, with the 50 states interposed to show their relative level of development, based on the two tables linked above:

1. Iceland - .968
2. Norway - .968
3. Canada - .967
4. Australia - .965
5. Ireland - .962
Connecticut - .962
Massachusetts - .961
New Jersey - .961
District of Columbia - .960
Maryland - .960
Hawaii - .959
New York - .959
6. Netherlands - .958
7. Sweden - .958
New Hampshire - .958
Minnesota - .958
Rhode Island - .958
California - .958
Colorado - .958
Virginia - .957
Illinois - .957
8. Japan - .956
9. Luxembourg - .956
10. Switzerland - .955
11. France - .955
Vermont - .955
Washington - .955
Alaska - .955
12. Finland - .954
Delaware - .953
13. Denmark - .952
Wisconsin - .952
14. Austria - .951
Michigan - .951
15. United States - .950
Iowa - .950
Pennsylvania - .950
16. Spain - .949
17. Belgium - .948
18. Greece - .947
Nebraska - .946
19. Italy - .945
20. New Zealand - .944
21. United Kingdom - .942
22. Hong Kong - .942
Kansas - .941
23. Germany - .940
Arizona - .939
North Dakota - .936
Oregon - .935
Maine - .932
Utah - .932
Ohio - .932
24. Israel - .930
Georgia - .928
Indiana - .928
25. South Korea - .927
North Carolina - .925
26. Slovenia - .923
27. Brunei - .919
28. Singapore - .918
Texas - .914
29. Kuwait - .912
30. Cyprus - .912
Missouri - .912
Nevada - .911
31. United Arab Emirates - .903
32. Bahrain - .902
South Dakota - .902
33. Portugal - .900
34. Qatar - .899
Florida - .898
35. Czech Republic - .897
Wyoming - .897
New Mexico - .895
36. Malta - .894
Idaho - .890
37. Barbados - .889
Montana - .885
38. Hungary - .877
39. Poland - .875
40. Chile - .874
41. Slovakia - .872
42. Estonia - .871
South Carolina - .871
43. Lithuania - .869
44. Latvia - .863
45. Croatia - .862
46. Argentina - .860
47. Uruguay - .859
48. Cuba - .855
49. Bahamas - .854
50. Costa Rica - .847
51. Mexico - .842
52. Libya - .840
53. Oman - .839
54. Seychelles - .836
55. Saudi Arabia - .835
56. Bulgaria - .834
57. Trinidad and Tobago - .833
58. Panama - .832
59. Antigua and Barbuda - .830
60. Saint Kitts and Nevis - .830
61. Venezuela - .826
62. Romania - .825
63. Malaysia - .823
64. Montenegro - .822
65. Serbia - .821
66. Saint Lucia - .821
Kentucky - .820
67. Belarus - .817
Tennessee - .816
Oklahoma - .815
Alabama - .809
68. Macedonia - .808
69. Albania - .807
70. Brazil - .807
71. Kazakhstan - .807
72. Ecuador - .807
73. Russia - .806
Arkansas - .803
74. Mauritius - .802
75. Bosnia and Herzegovina - .802
Louisiana - .801
West Virginia - .800
Mississippi - .799
76. Turkey - .798

As you can see, there's a number of states, mostly in the Northeast but some in the Midwest and West, that are as highly developed as just about anywhere in the world. Other states are more similar to the Asian Tiger countries or the more marginal areas of Western Europe. Still others are most comparable to some of the emerging economies of Eastern Europe or the Petrostates of the Middle East.

And then there is a group of Southern States that is a good jag farther down the list. These eight states - Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Mississippi - form a core region where human development index scores are well below the HDIs of any other country that would clearly be considered "highly developed." Among the nations that have a higher HDI than each of these states are Cuba, Mexico, Libya, Bulgaria, Panama, Malaysia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Four of these states rank below Albania, which has a per capita GDP of $6,000. In terms of human development, this clutch of states in the Upland and Deep South is well outside of the mainstream of developed economies.

China and US Trade

Mint has a visualization of trade relations between the US and China, and between those countries and the world.



Some numbers from the graphic:

Total US Exports: $1.38 Trillion
Total Chinese Exports: $1.47 Trillion
Total US imports: $2.19 Trillion
Total Chinese imports: $1.16 Trillion
Total US Exports to China: $71.4 Billion
Total Chinese Exports to the US: $337.8 Billion
Top destination for US exports: Canada ($261.4 Billion)
Top destination for Chinese exports: US; EU is next ($300.5 Billion)
Top source of US imports: China; Canada is next ($335.6 Billion)
Top source of Chinese imports: Japan ($152.1 Billion)

The Geography of Brand Shares

More mappiness via Matt Yglesias. He links to a post by Andrew Gelman that has these maps:



The maps are pertinent to an article (pdf), which Yglesias also links to, which argues that brands which are first to enter a given market are likely to maintain an edge in that market, even more than a century after their first competition from other brands:

We document evidence of a persistent “early entry” advantage for brands in 34 consumer packaged goods industries across the 50 largest U.S. cities. Current market shares are higher in markets closest to a brand’s historic city of origin than in those farthest. For six industries, we know the order of entry among the top brands in each of the markets. We find an early entry effect on a brand’s current market share and perceived quality across U.S. cities. The magnitude of this effect typically drives the rank order of market shares and perceived quality levels across cities. [...] Across 49 current leading national CPG brands, dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, we find that the current share in markets close to the city of origin, is, on average, 12 share (i.e., percentage) points higher than the national average of 22 percent.

You'll note that Starbucks was started in Seattle, and Walmart was started in Arkansas.

The paper itself includes these maps:

The joint geographic distribution of share levels and early entry across US markets in ground coffee. The areas of the circles are proportional to share levels. Shaded circles indicate a brand locally moved first.

As you can see, Maxwell House is the Biggie Smalls to Folgers' Tupac, with each brand performing stronger near the area that they started out (Nashville for Maxwell House and San Francisco for Folgers). Other examples of this phenomenon include Miller beer, which was introduced in Chicago in 1856 and still has a disproportionate share of that city's beer market, and Heinz ketchup, which started out in Pittsburgh and still does better in that city than elsewhere.

This is, Now, the Third Unemployment Map of the United States That I'm Posting Here

This map showed unemployment at the county level. And this map showed the unemployment rate over time at the state level. Now, in a sort of Hegelian synthesis of recession cartography, Slate has an interactive and animated map of county-level unemployment rates evolving over time since before the economy went skydiving with a parachute of ornamental cutlery.



Blues are good. Reds are bad. Circle sizes show number of jobs gained or lost.

What's great about this one is that the animation really lets you see how the recession spread - first out of Michigan and the industrial Midwest (which was sort of never out of recession to begin with), then to the bubble-towns of Florida and Southern California, before invading manufacturing areas in the South and other areas on the coasts, and finally pretty much everywhere else in the country that doesn't have an energy-based economy. (I wonder how much of the relative strength of the economies in places like Louisiana, Texas, and Alaska has to do with the huge spike in oil prices during 2008.) And as employment attrition marches grimly across the land, an azure sea of hearty growth becomes, over time, stained a bloody red. The map really explodes with big red vircles in January of this year.

You can also mouse over counties to see their numbers, though the feature is a bit wonky; it seems really determined to make me see that Suffolk County, NY has lost 19,642 jobs since February 2008, but won't let me know what's gone on in New York City, about the job market of which I have more than a passing interest at the moment. Still, a very good map with a ton of information.