Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/26/the-median-household-income-of.html
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What would be really cool is to overlay a map of median cost of living.
$200,000 will get you a run-down shoebox up here in MA, but a McMansion in FL.
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I would also like to see an overlay for this map that shows the partisan lean of each state.
Just looking at the states that comprised the CSA, I hypothesize a strong correlation between lower median income and strong Republican lean.
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For GA, I suspect that if you took out the metro area, then you’d get the same average as our western neighbors.
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I was thinking along the same lines for WA.
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Better visualization would help things. OK let’d do it by county for each state or maybe a web of 100 roughly similarly sized regions per state, but instead of surface area (dirt don’t vote, yet it has two Senators from every rural state)… A cartogram! My kingdom for a cartogram of the US based on population and then overlay income. Or a height map of the us based on population then paint the map on top of that by income on a fine grain. I bet people are wealthiest where there are lots of people.
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Although, ignoring ATL that might not put us into the lowest, as agriculture and the Savannah ports are a decent part of our state-wide economy. Atlanta is just really growing economically.
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Lower income causes Republicanism?
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I know a bunch of folks who have left Massachusetts (my state) when they retire. It only makes sense. High income = high cost of living. Sweet deal if you can handle living outside the expectations of a Ma. resident.
Not saying I can do that though.
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Correlation 
Causation
Although, if you’re looking for provable causes, strong correlations are certainly a good place to start 
But if lower income actually did cause Republicanism, that could go a long way to bringing so-called “mainstream” Democrats on-board with Universal Basic Income 
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The degree of inequality indicated by those state-level Gini coefficients is just staggering. If New York state was considered as its own country, it would be the 12th most unequal in the world, just outpacing Colombia.
Also, this state-level data shows that the common attempt to deny inequality in the US is plain wrong. Critics try to say that other countries have lower inequality because they have fewer people and because the US has big differences in cost of living. These stats say nope to that. Every single state has a Gini of over 40%, compared to 30.8% for the EU as a whole, and into the mid-20s for the most equal first world countries.
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The only reason Virginia is that high is because of the DC metro area. The southern two thirds of the state is dirt poor.
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Alaska is the least densely populated state, but is in the top tier of median income. Wyoming’s #2 and is in the 2nd tier.
On the other end of the scale is West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama - all in the middle third of population density.
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I think there’s better data to conclude rural areas are more likely to be both low income and to vote Republican.
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What’s up with Delaware?
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We’re not even sure it’s a real state. I’ve been there, and found it inconclusive.
It may just be a suburb of Philadelphia
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Wife and I relocated to the Springfield area and were hoping to build a house, but land for sale in the towns with good school systems was going for $150-250k an acre. Madness!
It’s redonkulous to do these kind of stats by US State any more.
Just look at VA - all the suburban DC wealth dragging the state average up, counteracting the massive swath of Appalachia stretching all the way down to the TN border. Need at least county-level granularity to make any sense of these data.
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Likely the other way around, Walter.
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Low income == less taxes == shitty schools == ignorant people == crappy jobs == low income == (repeat).
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