More on my county data: I'm collecting data on all U.S. counties with populations over 250,000.
Which of these counties would you guess has the most poverty? Perhaps Hinds, Mississippi (Jackson) which has the highest concentration of blacks--65.2%? Wrong--the poorest county is Hidalgo, TX. Almost one-third of the residents (31.7%) fall under the poverty line. What could explain all that poverty, even more poverty than the Bronx (25.4%)? Could it be that 89.4% of Hidalgans are Hispanic?
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Hildalgo has a population of 7,322 and the lowest income county in the U.S irrespective of population is Buffalo County, South Dakota which is overwhelmingly Native American.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I am retarded. I confused Hidalgo city with Hidalgo county. Ignore the previous comment.
ReplyDeleteHi. I posted several days ago on your "Olympics and Nielson ratings" blog entry.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, let me say there are interesting observations on this blog, and the GSS is an amazing tool.
Now, I see you dish out all sorts of information show how poor/uneducated/criminal-prone Hispanics are. OK, true. Hispanic communities need to work hard on education and crime, but.... WHAT EXACTLY are you trying to achieve by blogging this information? You have many links to very conservative sites (i.e. VDARE is one example), and there are no doubt much, much more all over the Internet which agree with your views, which says something about how people are feeling inside. With this in mind, it makes me wonder if any seemingly polite white person secretly pre-judges and even hates me, without even knowing that I do not fit the demographic average of the "uneducated, criminal" Hispanic. For all I know, my neighbors probably slur behind my back after a cheerful "good morning!"
It's obvious you don't care much Hispanics (you are free to feel what you want to feel) but if that's the case, why don't you seek employment at an institution that has few to no Hispanic students? (I know that you're a professor, based on your previous posts).
You and many others have a right to write what you want to write about, but I think honesty should go hand in hand with freedom of speech, and as the educated person that you are, I think you can do more than just write bitter observations.
The county-level collection of data on the USA Counties web site
ReplyDeletehttp://censtats.census.gov/usa/usa.shtml
seems like a great source for research on demographics, employment & income, crime, social programs, housing, voting patterns etc. I wonder how much the county level data has been used in the academic research.
A while ago I wrote a Perl script to put together a data table based on information on the USA Counties site. I selected a bunch of the more interesting variables and collected the numbers for every US county.
My big finding IIRC was that the percentage of single-mom households is a pretty robust predictor of crime in a county, even controlling for income, education, and minority population percentages. Poverty on the other hand doesn't predict crime much at all in this data set.
Currently the script and data table I made are sitting on a disconnected drive. I'll try and dig it up if you're interested.