If you’re as excited as I am about the upcoming Olympics and enjoy cool maps, you will like the Olympics medal count map featured in today’s New York Times. Check it out here.
Click through, year-by-year, to see the rise of the Pacific Rim countries.
To do this, they compared every U.S. micropolitan area — 140 to be exact — on a variety of metrics.
Here’s the top 10 …
1. Torrington, CT
2. Bozeman, MT
3. Lexington Park, MD
4. Lebanon, NH
5. Helena, MT
6. Kalispell, MT
7. Mankato, MN
8. Oak Harbor, WA
9. Stevens Point WI
10. Concord, NH
A great profile of the top 10 is here. A complete ranking of the 140 is here.
Are you a dreamtown fan or an urban junkie?
I guess I picked a good occupation, or should I say occupations. Educators and authors are two of the 10 happiest occupations, according to this 2007 University of Chicago study (h/t: Charlotta Mellander). Clergy top the list, however. Psychologists are happy, as are artists, sculptors, office supervisors, and operating engineers. More here.
According to these Forbes rankings, the Texas Triangle of Houston, Dallas and Austin score 1, 2 and 3, Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, Charlotte, and San Francisco all scored in the top 10. Take that NY, LA, Chicago, Boston and DC. My hunch is Forbes is giving way too much weight to “cost of living” in an era of front-loaded careers. Their rankings of best cities for young professionals make a bit more intuitive sense. Saine bet for young professionals as well as recent college grads came in 9th. One of the assignments in my economic development course is to deconstruct Forbes’ rankings of the best cities for business. Guess what their next assignment might be? (pointer via CEOs for Cities).
Urban economist Ed Glaeser says NYC has a Houston problem. Houston has more affordable housing, less congestion, and easier commutes – all because of its “deregulated market,” lack of rent control, and ease of construction. Ryan Avent says not only is Glaeser wrong, he’s contradicting his own research.
Mark Thoma points us to new research by Elizabeth Casico and her collaborators on how young Americans stack up in the global competition for skills:
Young Americans entering the labor market today face substantial competition.
Employers can look all over the world for workers with the skills to meet their
firms’ needs. Are young Americans ready for these challenges? …This Economic Letter summarizes new research by Cascio, Clark, and
Gordon (2008) (hereafter CCG) that uses data from the International Adult
Literacy Survey (IALS), fielded in the 1990s, to address this issue. The authors
estimate the skill levels of 16- and 17-year-olds and 26- to 30-year-olds for
the United States and other high-income countries. Consistent with other
assessments of the school-age population, the IALS data show that U.S. 16- and
17-year-olds perform poorly relative to their counterparts in other nations. By
their late 20s, however, those in the U.S. group in the IALS data compare much
more favorably to their counterparts abroad, suggesting that they are able to
“catch up” in college or beyond.
I find this research fascinating: It lines up completely with my personal experience. As a working class kid who had to hide the fact that I was “smart,” my “skill level” and test scores at 16 or 17 would surely have lagged against many international competitors and middle-class Americans. But a Garden State scholarship and admission to Rutgers fundamentally changed my trajectory. I made up ground very quickly and then continued along into and through graduate school. I wish I still had my scores: But if I recall correctly, my GRE’s were in the neighborhood of 400 or 500 points higher than my SATs.
I can’t wait to see if they have subnational data for the US, and – hey wait a minute – any data at all for Canada.
Walkscore.com has rated and ranked the “walkability” of more than 2500 US neighborhoods. Here’s the top 10. The site allows you to click on the city to get list of walkable neighborhoods. Nice maps too.
Some obvious ones: NYC’s Tribeca, Little Italy and Soho; DC’s Dupont and Logan Circles; Boston’s Back Bay, Beacon Hill and South End. But it’s terrific to see L.A. and Long Beach on the top 10 list.
(Image from the Boston Globe )
Density makes places more Democratic. That’s the conclusion from this map and the accompanying Boston Globe article (via Planetizen) by Robert David Sullivan:
The accompanying map shows where the electorate has grown the most
over the past half-century – counties that in 2004 cast at least 10,000
votes and at least double the votes cast in the 1960 race between John
F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. In just about every major metropolitan
area, Democrats are strongest in the center and Republicans fare best
farther out, but the patterns depend on how long ago the suburbs began
to grow.In the oldest metropolitan areas, there are outlying
counties that were solidly Republican in the 1960s and 1970s, but have
trended Democratic as development has cooled down. (They include
Barnstable County in Massachusetts. Southern New Hampshire, past its
peak rate of growth, is heading in the same direction.) This phenomenon
has had a significant impact on presidential elections. When California
was one of the fastest-growing states, it was reliably Republican, but
it became safely Democratic in the 1990s, when its population growth
rate fell sharply …Sprawl has kept
Republicans competitive at the national level, but the “frontier vote”
may be reaching its limit. The rising price of gasoline and a soft
housing market (made worse by the foreclosure crisis) have had more
people questioning the value of long commutes and mansion-sized houses.
Ok, now I’m really excited. One of our central goals here at MPI is to create integrated North American (that is Canada and the US) data-sets. And in our ongoing work, especially in developing the new Canadian edition of Who’s Your City? we’ve been developing maps of North American data on various regional economic and demographic measures. So was I more than delighted to see the map above developed by David Eaves based on an original map I posted from calorielab (via strange maps and Andrew Sullivan). Eaves comments:
If Canadian provinces were ranked along side US States, they would
rank 1st (BC), 2nd (QC), 3rd (ON), 4th (AL) and tied for 5th (MB) (YK)
as the least obese provinces/states. Colorado would be the first
American state placing 7th, with the provinces of NS in 8th and SK in
9th. PEI and NB would appear 15th and 16th and NL would appear 19th.
NWT and NU would close out in 30th and 31st position. You can see the
original chart at the bottom of this page.
Actually even some of the grimmer looking patches of Canada’s map
have a silver lining. The Arctic Territories, specifically Nunavut (NU)
and the North-West Territories (NWT), appear obese and thus unhealthy.
However, Statistics Canada notes that obesity criterion for Inuit
populations should be more relaxed since a high BMI does not appear to
have the same health risk for Inuit as for non-Inuit.
