A DC think tank recently published an interesting report titled The 2017 Distressed Communities Index. With a lot of fancy animated maps and graphs ( which you know I like), the report documents the demography of poverty across the United States, documenting the difference between rich and poor in terms of location, education, employment and various other indicators of economic success or failure. Among the chief take home points is the observation that prosperity is widely distributed but poverty is not, with a disproportionate concentration of distressed communities found in the South and Southwest. Furthermore, distressed cities notwithstanding (we're talking about you Cleveland), there is high correlation between population density and prosperity; the more people in a given place, the better off they seem to be.
I'm way not smart enough to figure out what these data might mean in terms of potential solutions, either from the top down or bottom up, for the 17% of Americans who live in distressed communities, As a political junkie, I find the data fascinating in terms of the weak correlation between the economic status of these areas and how they vote. Here is deeply prosperous and deeply blue Virginia (distress rate 17%) side by side with deeply distressed and deeply red West Virginia (distressed rate 34%). Poor New Mexico (29%) votes blue, while more prosperous Texas (22%) remains deeply red. These data, it seems it me, say something powerful about the limitations of an economic message as a tool to attract voters. The Republicans, it seems, have already absorbed that lesson
Eli
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