Category: Demographics
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It’s the Money, Stupid
A fascinating article in Sunday’s New York Times deals with one of the subjects that is a frequent topic on this blog—housing patterns. Using demographic data from the Census Bureau and home lending data published as part of the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the reporters “identified every census tract in the country that has…
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Rural Exodus, Metro Influx Continue Unabated
The population of Virginia’s rural counties and small towns continues to shrink. Reports Radio IQ: “Large parts of Southwest Virginia are disappearing. That’s according to new numbers from the Census Bureau that show places like Wise County, Henry County, Buchanan County — they’re all significantly smaller than they were a decade ago. Tazewell County alone…
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Counting Death, Refugees and Migration in 1860s Virginia
Bacon’s Rebellion has been wallowing in history as of late, so we can’t pass up the latest research from the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia analyzing the impact of the Civil War on Virginia’s population. The war was bloody, of course. Recent historians have estimated the total number of military deaths around…
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Bacon Bits: Economic Research Edition
I periodically check the research papers coming out of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) because they often address issues of interest to Bacon’s Rebellion. The research is far more rigorous from a methodological perspective than the work product of special-interest and advocacy groups, hence more worthy of serious consideration — even when it…
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Welcome to New Jersey: Virginia Out-Migration Edition
A few weeks ago I cited United Van Line data suggesting that more people continued in 2017 to move out of Virginia than moved in. Now Hamilton Lombard at the University of Virginia’s Demographic Research Group has confirmed the trend using Internal Revenue Service data. Total population continued to grow last year thanks to natural…
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Crazy, Diverse Asians
In their obsession with identity politics and racial/ethnic classification, federal and state governments in the United States classify millions of Americans as “Asian.” From a sociological perspective, “Asian” is a meaningless term. Asia is the world’s largest continent and has more diverse indigenous populations than any other. As this graphic from the University of Virginia’s…
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More People Still Moving Out of Virginia than Moving In
Virginia is still leaking population through out-migration, according to the most recent United Van Lines national movers study, which tracks customers’ state-to-state migration patterns in 2018. The gap between those moving into the state and moving out was small — 48.4% inbound compared to 51.6% outbound, but it continues a discouraging trend of the past…
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Map of the Day: Virginia’s Disabled Populations
In Lee County, Virginia’s westernmost jurisdiction, more than one quarter of the population (25.7%) has a disability, according to American Community Survey data. The rate of disabilities — physical or mental impairments that limit a person’s ability to work — is almost as high in neighboring counties, as shown in this map produced by the…
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Go South, Old Man, Go South
Haha! I got a chuckle out of this chart published in Investors Business Daily, a notorious “climate denier” publication. With climate-change warriors hyping the disastrous economic impact of climate change on the human economy, you’d think people would be moving north. But it turns out they’re moving south…. toward warmer climes! Writes IBD: More than…
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Statewide School Enrollment Declined in 2018
After decades of steady enrollment growth, Virginia’s public school system had 2,000 fewer students in 2018 than the year before. The trend is not uniform geographically; enrollment is still increasing in some school systems while it is falling in others. But the net result statewide is fewer students statewide, according to our favorite demographer, Hamilton…
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Virginia’s Disconnected Youth
Virginia’s overall unemployment rate has been declining steadily for years, reaching 3.2% in June 2018. But youth unemployment remains disconcertingly high. Indeed roughly 10% of the state’s 16- to 24-year-olds are “disconnected” from the labor force, neither working nor pursuing an education, reports Shonel Sen, a researcher with the Demographics Research Group at the University…
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A Performance Rating for Virginia Local Governments
Goochland County offers the most bang for the buck of the localities in the Richmond metropolitan region, according to a local government rating system devised by the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation. The rating system compares fiscal indicators such as property tax rates and collections, per capita indebtedness, school spending per capita, and unfunded pension…
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Virginia’s Not-So-Crazy Rich Asians
Once the victims of discrimination, Asians now are prospering in the United States. The median income in 2017 for Asians in the United States was $83,500. That compared to a national average of $60,300 — a 38% differential. In Virginia, Asians’ incomes, and the income gap with other Americans, was even greater: $101,500 compared to…
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Some School Districts Do a Better Job Educating Poor Kids than Others
I’m playing around with Datawrapper, which provides cool ways to display data– don’t quite have the hang of it, but making progress. Anyway, my inaugural effort shows the considerable variability between school districts in pass rates for English Standards of Learning (SOL) tests. We all know that the socio-economic status of a student is a major predictor…
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A Metric in Which Virginia Does Not Stand Tall
Which state has the tallest people? Not Virginia, that’s for sure. The tallest men live in states the northern Plains, the northern Rockies and Southern/Central Appalachia, according to Centers for Disease Control data mapped by the Washington Post. The states with the tallest women on average are clustered mainly in the northern Plains and Rockies.…