The Poor Stay Poor...
I've been playing around with the BEA's Local Income data, and was struck by how much has changed since 1975, and how much has stayed the same. Back then, thanks to high oil prices, Fairbanks and Anchorage, Alaska were the two richest metropolitan areas (MSAs) in the country. The three poorest MSAs were Brownsville, Laredo and McAllen, all on the Texas-Mexico border.
The graph below shows the changes in ranking of the ten richest (rank=100%) and ten poorest (rank = 0%) MSAs between 1975 and 2004.
The rich areas have seen a good deal of mixing, with Fairbanks, AK and Honolulu, HI completely falling out of the top decile. No such luck for the poorest areas: after 30 years, Brownsville, Laredo and McAllen are still dead last.
Here's the raw data:
The graph below shows the changes in ranking of the ten richest (rank=100%) and ten poorest (rank = 0%) MSAs between 1975 and 2004.
The rich areas have seen a good deal of mixing, with Fairbanks, AK and Honolulu, HI completely falling out of the top decile. No such luck for the poorest areas: after 30 years, Brownsville, Laredo and McAllen are still dead last.
Here's the raw data:
posted by Marc Shivers at 5:18 PM
3 Comments:
I come from these areas mainly the Mcallen area. I have to say that it is not as bad as it seems. The standard of living is way low and and avg house prices are way less than $100,000.
Now that you mention it, I wonder what these numbers would look like if they were adjusted for cost-of-living differences. I bet the picture would look quite a bit different. I grew up in Hawaii, and you can't even buy a garage there for $100,000.
Adjusting for cost-of-living would not be a particularly meaningfull thing to do; people can choose to move from Alaska to Texas to Hawaii or whereever else they choose inside the us; thus different prices reflect different demands for goods (most notisably housing) in different parts of the country. So to the extnet that the dession of where to live is nto related to a particular job (in which case location is at least partly an input into the production function) then it makes no sense if we believe in revelad preferences to adjust for prices. I think that for the bulk of people the jobs are interchangable enough (being a clerk or some such) that it doesnt matter where they live and thus the baove is reasonable.
OTOH some jobs (computer programmers adn the valley, traders and Chicago or NYC) the above logic is not so clear cut. The Fiarbanks case also comes to mind (building the pipe). but this seems to matter a lto more for some places than others.
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