This looks to be a major advance in our ability to track in near real time the regional evolution of the U.S. economy. If I had seen this pattern of regional growth and decline a decade ago, it would have made me less worried about the gerrymandering that the Constituion has built into the Senate. The people in declining areas are relatively poor, and they have little economcic or cultural power, so giving them more political power might have created a fairer overall balance. Yet somehow it does not seem to have worked out that way: their senators are not fighting for a fairer division of wealth, but seem focused on achieving negative sum goals for the country at large—if we can't be prosperous, you shouldn't be prosperous either. Raksha Kopparam: County-Level GDP Gives Insight into Local-Level U.S. Economic Growth https://equitablegrowth.org/new-measure-of-county-level-gdp-gives-insight-into-local-level-u-s-economic-growth/: 'The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis released a new measure.... Local Area Gross Domestic Product. LAGDP is an estimate of GDP at the county level between the years of 2001—2018.... Growth since the end of the Great Recession in mid-2009... is concentrated in the West Coast states and parts of the Midwest. States such as Nevada, West Virginia, New Mexico, and Wyoming have seen a significant number of counties contract in economic output since the recession. One of the benefits of this new LAGDP measure is that it provides an industry-specific breakdown.... Trends in the manufacturing industry and how manufacturing has contributed to GDP pre- and post-Great Recession are also now more trackable.... Manufacturing... [in] clusters of counties on the East Coast and the Midwest suffered contractions. Although overall manufacturing output in North Carolina increased, many counties experienced heavy declines over the past 17 years.... 20 percent of the nation’s economic growth is concentrated in 11 counties, including the cities of Los Angeles, New York, and Harris, Texas...
#noted #2020-03-06
