when countries develop unevenly part 1: US disparity in South + Appalachia

Unfortunately this isn’t a subject where I can compare countries and their regions to other countries. Instead, here is a selection of articles and related maps that deal with the problem of uneven growth across various counties. I want to stress that these graphs use different measurements from different time periods and thus cannot be compared with each other. I will provide links for the maps I use and give a brief summary of the research that corresponds with them.

The first example I would like to present is from a familiar source, the USA. here we can use a brilliant website designed by social/political scientists to display a variety of statistics relating to US development. using measureofamerica.org you can access an HDI map of the US that is divisible to the congressional district level. here is a state level map of the US using their latest dataset.

I got this map here it covers most US cultural regions that I accept with its omission of Appalachia NOTWITHSTANDING.

look at measure of america. wow here is the HDI of the US

this website is really interesting.

Look at what happens when you gauge obesity and diabetes in the USA:

This shows a tendency of Appalachia and southern US states to be have comparatively bad health. The West and New England do well here. How about Diabetes?

between these two maps, the unhealthiness of Appalachia stays strong. What are they doing wrong?

Diane Sawyer has some ideas about this

here are some other maps from Appalachian Regional Commission 

This shows college completion rates in the region and compares it to the US average.

Another troubled area represented on the HDI map is the US South. Breaking the region down by Congressional District allows us to look closer at regional disparity by showing disparity inside states.

Using the HDI data from our earlier source, lets see what the bottom 100 US Congressional districts look like:

It’s important to note that the bottom 100 districts is an arbitrary measure and many districts with similar HDI values were excluded. Nonetheless it includes the important bottom quintile with about 10 districts from the next lowest quintile. It also provides us with nearly a quarter of the 437 US congressional districts so I went with it. This map took a long time to make so please feel free to verify my findings here

In many states there are examples of urban poverty as well as rural/agrarian poverty being represented. In my region (Pacific Northwest) the eastern districts in Oregon and Washington are examples of rural poverty. NYC provides an intriguing example of urban poverty. The district NY-16 is one of the lowest HDI scores in the US, it sits nearly adjacent to NY-14, the district with the highest score in the US. The difference in the scores (8.79 vs 3.20) shows how geography can mean little when defining a region’s development.

But while NY-14 sticks out, it pales in comparison to the overwhelming poverty of the US South+Appalachia. To corroborate my view of the US South look to this wikipedia page

Of the 100 lowest HDI scores, this combined region contributes 59 districts (59%). When you count the bottom 50 this region contributes 30 (60%).

But when you count only the bottom 25 you get a staggering 20 Southern+Appalachian districts or 80% of the bottom 25. This map illustrates the disparity:

  Here’s a chart of the 100 lowest HDI scores and my Southern+Appalachian selections in red:

Feel free to disagree with my assessment of the South or of Appalachia. This was excluding a large number of districts that seem to have an inconclusive regional definition. For example, Florida-23 straddles the Miami metro region and wasn’t included on the list. I only included two districts in Texas (CD1 and CD5) because the rest had mixed definitions for culture; Oklahoma-2 was the only district included. The northern district of OH-17 was excluded because only part of it is included in the ARC regional map. Missouri’s regional definition produced conflicting results but the southern districts of MO-8, MO-7, and MO-4 appear to reliably count as “southern.” The rest are 100% Southern and/or Appalachian. I wouldn’t have included Northern Virginia but none of their districts had a low HDI score so it didn’t matter.