
Five-Year Trends Available for Median Income, Poverty and Internet Use - infodocket
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/2013-2017-acs-5year.html
======
michaelkschmidt
Maps like this give a sobering view of the Healthcare debate.

Insurance for a family is now > $20K a year. Look at how many counties this
would be half or more of the median pay. The whole situation seems like a
melt-down ready to happen.

~~~
hnaccy
>The whole situation seems like a melt-down ready to happen.

How will it melt down, won't they just become infirm or die?

~~~
smileysteve
Skyrocketing bankruptcy rates and losses of generational wealth.

Potentially causing the next recession.

Or, we modify the system, the whole health insurance industry and hospital
industry causes a recession.

~~~
mlindner
You know we didn't have this problem back in the early 1900s. It would be
helpful if regulation didn't completely eliminate the ability of unions to
pool together funds and create their own mini-insurance collectives.
Regulation killed that by forcing all doctors to be licensed, a very expensive
process that limits the supply of doctors and nurses.

~~~
smileysteve
> You know we didn't have this problem back in the early 1900s.

1900s... so, the X-Ray machine had just been invented. Antibiotics, Radiation,
Chemotherapy, laparoscopy, endoscopy, the mri, titanium, stainless steel.
Medicine was in a relative infancy and outcomes were much, much worse.

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welliman
Blatant plug: for large scale analysis on census and survey data I'd recommend
checking out nhgis.org. It lets you download the large pieces of demographic
data that you may be interested in. Data harmonized across time is also
available to investigate trends.

Note: We don't have the 5-year 2017 ACS data yet (it takes about 2 weeks for
us to ingest the data once it comes out).

Disclosure: I'm a developer at IPUMS.

~~~
philrhurst
I've used ACS and IPUMS data previously for research while at university. What
are your thoughts on the proposed "differential privacy" changes [0] coming
this way? Is it a "sky is falling" kind of situation?

[0] [https://www.ipums.org/census-bureau-
data.shtml](https://www.ipums.org/census-bureau-data.shtml)

~~~
welliman
It's not really my area of expertise, but from what I understand it will
severely limit what policy and demographic research can be done with the data.
There's a working paper on the page you linked to which has more information:
[https://assets.ipums.org/_files/mpc/MPC-Working-
Paper-2018-6...](https://assets.ipums.org/_files/mpc/MPC-Working-
Paper-2018-6.pdf).

------
chaostheory
> Loudoun County, Va.; Fairfax County, Va.; Howard County, Md.; Falls Church
> City, Va.; and Arlington County, Va., were among the highest counties by
> median household income.

Are these counties where lobbyists live?

~~~
cwal37
Lots and lots and lots of dual-income lawyers and consultants. This is one of
the areas where, on average, women have their first child at a very late
age[1]. Lobbying across a wide array of industries but also defense
contractors and such. I was actually just looking at median home
sizes/prices[2] in that area for June of this year. I live in Arlington,
bought a house earlier this year and discovered $425k is pretty much the
bottom of the non-condo market, we only saw about 1 go up per month and
everything closed immediately. Feels nuts here.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-
bir...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-
gap.html)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/ConnorWaldoch/status/1070301922349981697](https://twitter.com/ConnorWaldoch/status/1070301922349981697)

~~~
nostrademons
$425K seems delightful here in Silicon Valley, where the bottom of the non-
condo market is about $1.3M and the bottom of the condo market is roughly
$900K.

~~~
cwal37
Should have known I couldn't mention housing prices without comparisons to the
literally-the-most-extreme outlier bay area. The DC area isn't geographically
constrained the same way, doesn't have the same concentration of hyper wealth,
has immediately-adjacent jurisdictions with regulatory setups more amenable to
development to California, and a much better/more extensive transit system.
Salaries for your typical fed or consultant here don't come close to the
engineering compensation in the bay for lower level employees.

Also, it's not $425k for a single family home. It's $425k for a 60-70 year old
brick or cinderblock townhome/duplex between 800-1000 sqft that was
constructed as WW2-boom housing.

~~~
nostrademons
The $1.3M homes in Mountain View are also 60-70 year old post-war construction
of roughly 800-1000 sq ft. A duplex will run you about $1.9M here. New
townhomes are roughly $1.6-1.7M. The sort of house that would be considered a
modest suburban middle-class dwelling in most other places go for about
$2.2-2.4M; a "nice house" (like the one my sister paid $550K for in the
Houston metropolitan area) goes for around $6M and can only be had in the
wealthy towns like Los Altos Hills or Atherton.

Yes, this is basically an extreme outlier for the U.S. I was surprised to find
that it's actually pretty reasonable compared to many urban areas in the
world, though - cities like Sydney, Vancouver, Hong Kong and Shanghai are
rapidly climbing past Silicon Valley in housing unaffordability.

------
dsfyu404ed
>From 2013-2017 among geographic areas with 10,000 people or more, the
locations with the highest and lowest poverty rates were:

>By metropolitan statistical area:

>Barnstable Town, Mass

As someone unfortunately familiar with the local economy in that cesspool
(will global warming hurry up and wash that glorified sandbar away already?)
this is a great illustration of how stats like this can be limited.

There is no shortage of money in Barnstable county. It is chock full of old
retired people and rich people (with a significant overlap). They mostly
happen to have primary residences elsewhere. Lots of people have their primary
residence in Florida. The only industry is tourism. For three months of the
year there is a firehouse of money directed at Barnstable county. The economic
incentives that come with that mean that everyone tries to rip everyone else
off and extract maximum value from everyone else (I could go on a pretty good
rant about this). The blue collar tradesmen get very good at keeping their
income off the books (I don't blame them, not doing so would be a competitive
disadvantage). Everyone has an under the table side gig. Many "businesses" pay
employees in cash. Jobs are often paid in cash.

Cape Cod is the Long Island of New England. While it's no SF suburb there is a
ton of money in Barnstable county. It's just that most of it gets reported
elsewhere or never gets reported at all so the county looks poor on paper. The
absurdly high cost of living doesn't help (doesn't help the people actually
struggling to get by that is). Housing is not as insane as Silly Valley but
every other thing is priced outrageously (what the market will bear thanks to
tourism) and you can't avoid those costs because you're basically on an
island.

So yeah, take those stats with a grain of salt. I suspect the national stats
are quite accurate but the county by county numbers are probably not that
great.

------
stdplaceholder
This summary of facts seems quite useless, presented as it is by county. If
poverty declined in two counties and increased in two counties, it makes a
difference which counties were which. If Mono County and Alpine County are
declining and San Mateo and Santa Clara are increasing, that is a very
different phenomenon than the reverse.

~~~
reaperducer
_This summary of facts seems quite useless, presented as it is by county._

My guess is that it's by county because this is 2018. The full census is done
every ten years. More granular information will come after the next full
census.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Assuming it’s properly funded and executed, which the current party in power
probably doesn’t want.

------
prossercj
This seems to show generally higher incomes around metropolitan areas, which I
would have expected. But there are some areas in the 75k+ bracket that
surprise me, such as:

1) Western and northeastern Wyoming

2) Western North Dakota

3) Northern Alaska

Does anyone know why that might be the case, and where the money could be
coming from? (National parks? Military bases? Oil fields?)

~~~
fetus8
Oil Fields.

Western Wyoming has some crazy huge oil fields and refineries. I would assume
similar cases for North Dakota and Alaska as well, but I don't know for sure.

~~~
dx87
Yep. My father works at an oil refinery in Northern Alaska and everyone there
is making well over 100k, around 200k for middle management, plus benefits
like a pension. Downside is that it's a frozen tundra where you can't go
outside without protective goggles to keep your eyes from freezing shut, but
they also work 2 weeks on / 2 weeks off, so it's basically 6 months of
vacation every year, in addition to normal vacation days. He said some people
chose to live in warmer places like Puerto Rico and just fly back and forth
every 2 weeks.

~~~
ghaff
>work 2 weeks on / 2 weeks off

I haven't been in the oil business for a very long time but that was a very
common pattern for offshore drilling rigs and the like. The interval of weeks
varied from 1 to 4 as I recall generally based on how remote the location was.

------
sbr464
Mississippi looks particularly bleak in regards to broadband speeds.

~~~
scarface74
Serious none snarky question. Is there anything about Mississippi that is not
bleak? I’ve lived in GA all of my life and at least we have the Atlanta metro
and to a lesser extent Macon and Savannah. Tennessee has some cities that I
wouldn’t mind living in.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Maybe some people don’t like living in cities and see your pros as cons?

~~~
moorhosj
Slow broadband, high poverty, poor education and high obesity are pretty
universal “cons”..

~~~
heywot
And not all of those are represented in rural areas. And "slow broadband"
feels hilariously out of place in that list.

~~~
scarface74
Tell that to developers who would be able to get a better paying job working
remotely if they had decent broadband.

~~~
heywot
I realize we're discussing this on HN but developers are a small microcosm of
the communities being listed. Sure, there's examples that might combat the
generality of my statement...but let's not be pedantic when that wasn't the
subject to begin with.

I can work remotely with a very basic internet connection. So can others. And
you can be a successful developer (in your country, let alone your county)
without working remotely.

~~~
scarface74
I stayed with my parents for a summer (long story) and worked remotely - it
was painful. I could barely do video conferencing let alone upload and
download large datasets fast over DSL. I ended up setting up a VM on AWS to
work from.

But on a less anecdotal note, legitimate companies are doing “rural sourcing”
of call centers where everyone works remotely and they give you a special boot
disk that only runs thier software. They pay better than minimum wage and the
requirement is a decent - above DSL internet connection.

~~~
ghaff
My dad in Maine is the last house that can get DSL on a private road. Internet
"works" but you can't do video or anything like that. One neighbor I know has
a hot spot through Verizon though mobile signal isn't great either. I believe
some others have satellite. If I had to work from there, I'd have to do
something to supplement the DSL.

------
jdlyga
I'd love to see a map that shows trends. Which areas are getting richer? Which
are getting poorer?

------
dahfizz
> Of the 3,142 counties in the United States, median household income declined
> in 222 counties (7.1 percent), while median household income increased in
> 521 counties (16.6 percent)

Does this mean that ~75% of counties had excatly zero change in median income?
Like down to the cent? With or without inflation? This is difficult to
believe. Even with stagnant wages you would expect some up and down across the
whole country.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
It's a census, so they're taking a sample. I would assume that 75% of counties
had statistical outcomes that weren't statistically significantly different
from the previous measurement. Consider if you sample the same county on the
same day 10 times, you'll get 10 different outcomes, that doesn't mean income
changed that day.

In addition, they may have used a threshold value. But it's not noted
anywhere.

I'd also assume indeed there was inflation-adjustment.

~~~
vaughnegut
But if you take a mean of those samples' means it would approach the
population mean with an approximately normal distribution. Isn't that only an
improvement? (Disclaimer I've only taken intro to stats at an undergrad level,
exam next week)

------
cbluth
The poverty rates and broadband service maps look like the other, except
opposite.

~~~
craftyguy
I think it makes sense, since broadband internet is relatively expensive
compared to other utilities that are more necessary. For example, if you have
$50 a month to spend on either electricity or broadband internet, you're
probably going to spend it on electricity (nevermind the fact that an inet
connection is useless if you have no electricity).

Did you expect it to be different?

~~~
mod
I agree it makes sense, but I think your example is ridiculous.

In my (rural) area, DSL internet is the only decent option, and I pay about
$72/month for it. It's acceptable, streams netflix okay, but I could never be
competitive in a FPS. But people around here are more interested in more
traditional activities. I think their rate of watching TV and engaging with
their phones and other similar measures would be far, far less than the
national average. I simply think internet is not a priority; they'd rather be
outside. At least in my small bubble.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Is there any data to support that rural dwellers spend more time outside than
dense urban dwellers? I’d expect the opposite, especially in cold weather.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
They're more likely to have outdoor jobs and tons more likely to spend any
recreational time outdoors.

City people drink their beer in a bar. Country people drink their beer
standing around a pile of burning pallets.

~~~
dragonwriter
> City people drink their beer in a bar.

Er, no, we mostly don't.

> Country people drink their beer standing around a pile of burning pallets.

I suspect they city and country people both mostly drink their beer outside of
business establishments, though, sure, standing around a pile of burning
pallets _specifically_ may be more common for country folk.

~~~
mcguire
City people stand around burning barrels.

~~~
mirimir
Maybe burning pallets in barrels. And trash, of course.

------
jxramos
Why is the government still bothering with such a variable quantity like
household income, why not per capita? Household income introduces unnecessary
complexity with how family sizes change over the decades, between ethnicity,
by divorce, and all sorts of other confounding factors.

[https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-
sowell/09/16/misleading...](https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-
sowell/09/16/misleading-statistics)

~~~
belorn
Simply because social economical status is a better prediction model. Family
members of a upper class household has more in common than peers of the same
income.

------
csytan
Quickie visualization from the recently released census: Poverty rate vs
election results
[https://twitter.com/csytan/status/1070800405125201920](https://twitter.com/csytan/status/1070800405125201920)

Posted on Twitter because HN doesn't support images

------
amyjess
Ooh... this seems nice. I'll have to update my census tool with this at some
point... I think I'm still using the 2011-2015 dataset.

