The Cartography of Recession

April 19, 2009 9:30 PM

The Cartography of Recession. Act I, The Collapse: Slate's interactive map of vanishing jobs by county, The Fed's maps of subprime mortgages, USA Today's housing bubble maps, Gini coefficients by state, budget deficits and foreclosures from CNN. Act II, Intervention: The data of Stimuluswatch, mapped, and expected job gains by state, while newspapers and the auto industry die. Act III, the Future: A terrific interactive map from the Atlantic (and accompanying article) hints at the future, showing the evolving patterns of population flows (also see the amazing New York Times immigration map), innovation, and income by city over time.
posted by blahblahblah (23 comments total)

How pleasant.
posted by TwelveTwo at 9:34 PM on April 19, 2009 [1 favorite]

The animated Slate map looks like a time-lapse representation of a nuclear war. It's a wonder there's anyone left in Michigan.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:39 PM on April 19, 2009 [1 favorite]

That immigration map is fun to play around with. One interesting finding- Germans and British are the most diffuse, not really clustering around the big population centers as much as everyone else.

Also, people from Norway and Sweden don't really want to move here. But that's probably because they have better countries.
posted by Afroblanco at 10:09 PM on April 19, 2009 [1 favorite]

Also, people from Norway and Sweden don't really want to move here.

If you look carefully, there's a very tiny dot in Minnesota for Lake Wobegon. (And it's red since the Powdermilk Biscuit Plant layoffs and subsequent mass shooting at the Sidetrack Tap and Chatterbox Cafe.)
posted by pracowity at 10:47 PM on April 19, 2009 [4 favorites]

dear God...

.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 10:52 PM on April 19, 2009

I noted that the count of tags for "sharecropping" in Ask.Mefi numbers only zero as of April 2009.
posted by crapmatic at 12:04 AM on April 20, 2009

Very cool maps, thanks for posting.
posted by fshgrl at 12:11 AM on April 20, 2009

The Bush Depression, brought to you by incompetence.
posted by Mick at 4:41 AM on April 20, 2009

The job loss map would be better if it was adjusted for population size or number of existing jobs. It's hard to tell which areas have been hit hard because they had the most jobs to lose and which ones have actually lost more than their share.
posted by burnmp3s at 4:46 AM on April 20, 2009

Gini coefficients by state

holy shit
posted by oaf at 5:44 AM on April 20, 2009

Also, people from Norway and Sweden don't really want to move here.

As of now. Use the slider at the top to move the time frame, you'll see when the Upper Midwest's Accent came into the country, ya.
posted by eriko at 5:55 AM on April 20, 2009

The job loss map would be better if it was adjusted for population size or number of existing jobs. It's hard to tell which areas have been hit hard because they had the most jobs to lose and which ones have actually lost more than their share.

Though it is a month out-of-date, this interactive map from the New York Times is what you are looking for.
posted by blahblahblah at 6:58 AM on April 20, 2009

Those gini coefficients were stunning. Michigan has the income inequality of the Phillipines?!
posted by BinGregory at 7:02 AM on April 20, 2009

There is a lot of sad personal stories hiding in those statistics.
posted by saucysault at 7:49 AM on April 20, 2009

I was also shocked by the GINI coefficients. I knew the US had a high GINI compared to most other developed countries, but I had no idea it was that high.
posted by jb at 7:58 AM on April 20, 2009

Yeah, but remember what happened in France when the income equality became far too high: loads of beheading-oriented fun! I wish the rich would understand that keeping their heads is the reason they pay more in taxes. Poor schmucks have nothing to lose from burning down the homes of the rich and beheading the occupants. You can't take anything from a man who has nothing. The rich, however, have a great deal to lose if there's widespread civil unrest, so it is to their benefit to keep the lower rungs of the economic ladder reasonably happy, if they value the connection between their shoulders and their heads.
posted by jamstigator at 8:09 AM on April 20, 2009 [2 favorites]

I knew the US had a high GINI compared to most other developed countries, but I had no idea it was that high.

As the author acknowledges in the comments, US GINI coefficients don't include government benefits in their measurements of income. So if you're unemployed, but getting food stamps, subsidized housing, public education for your children, and AFDC/TANF checks, you go down in the stats as 0% of GDP but really you're receiving some of it. Unfortunately, with the move to temporary aid for needy families, this means that when you suddenly run out of eligibility and that TANF check goes away, the downtick of intractable poverty isn't registered, either. Convenient, that.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:16 AM on April 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

By the way, this is a great post! Lots of important data presented in a palatable form. The opposite of eponysterical, blahblahblah!
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:18 AM on April 20, 2009

Wow! I'd never heard of the GINI index, but it explains a whole shitload about Puerto Rico, with its GINI index of a whopping 57%! (!) And I'll bet Ponce in particular is higher still than the island as a whole. It's fascinating when a simple number resonates with five years of lived experience.
posted by Michael Roberts at 3:41 PM on April 20, 2009

The NYT had an interactive map of unemployment by county a few weeks ago but the first map (at Slate) is much more detailed. It's like watching a tumor metastasize.
posted by Devils Slide at 6:41 PM on April 20, 2009

Since people are interested, Gini coefficients by country over time, from Wikipedia. (by the way, it is Gini, named after an Italian, not GINI, as in an acronym)
posted by blahblahblah at 8:19 PM on April 20, 2009

It's a wonder there's anyone left in Michigan.

Throughout 2007 there's one light blue spot in Michigan. I believe that is Isabella county, home of Central Michigan University.

It's also home to Soaring Eagle Casino, which depressingly is probably where most of the growth was.
posted by formless at 8:22 PM on April 20, 2009

Wow, blahblahblah, that's a nice graph -- and yeah, I found the Gini reference after I posted that. Also the information that Puerto Rico's Gini index was 57% in 1990, but had risen to 60.9% by 2000. I'll bet it's even higher now; although Puerto Rico does economic statistics yearly, apparently, I can't find any updated yearly values. That would be pretty interesting.

Very, very descriptive number. It really explains a lot to me that's been bothering me for years. There's lots of money on this island. It just ... doesn't do anything. Now I know why.

Case in point. Up in Indiana, malls are owned by, like, corporations. Simon Brothers, right? I think that's the big mall company up there. Down here, malls are owned by families. One family owns Plaza las Americas in San Juan, and (I believe) the Seralles family owns the Plaza Caribe here in Ponce. I'm not sure it's the Seralles family. I know they own the Hilton, but it might be somebody else that owns the mall.

Anyway, Plaza Las Americas has its own exit from the freeway, up in San Juan. Two years ago, they built an exit from the freeway here in Ponce, to Plaza Caribe. Not because there was a business case or even particular traffic problems solved. It was because the owners thought it was pretty cool to have a freeway exit for their mall, like those folks up in San Juan. So they paid for it.

That really blew my mind. Well, that and the real estate prices for a place that has no fricking productive economy at all. It's like, a different country down here or something.
posted by Michael Roberts at 8:31 PM on April 22, 2009