New Geography

Author: Mark Schill

  • Auto Bailout: Follow the Money to House Votes

    This probably won’t shock you, but MapLight is reporting today that those House of Representatives members voting for the auto bailout received 65% more in campaign contributions from the auto industry than did those who voted against:

    House Democrats voted overwhelmingly in favor of this bill, 205 voting Yes and 20 voting No (11 not voting). Democrats voting Yes received an average of $74,846 each, about 19% more than those voting No, who received an average of $63,140.

    House Republicans were somewhat more divided on this bill, 32 voting Yes and 150 voting No (16 not voting). Republicans voting Yes received an average of $69,323 each, 63% more than those voting No, who received an average of $42,598.

    MapLight charted a similar situation with the financial industry bailout.

  • Where is the financial bailout money going?

    So far the Treasury Department has spread out $241 billion to AIG and 124 banks in mostly coastal states and Ohio and Indiana. Check out ProPublica’s frequently updated map of financial bailout recipients. ProPublica is monitoring the bailout and offers an RSS feed and a bailout widget to keep tabs on where the money is going.

    Here’s some other financial crisis visuals:

    Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis
    A map at GEOCommons of the Wachovia takeover by Wells Fargo
    Our GeoCommons Map of states dependent on the securities, commodities and investments industries

  • Maps of United States Manufacturing and Finance Industry

    For our War of the Regions piece I went through BLS data and calculated location quotients for a few key diverging industries, namely manufacturing and securities, commodities and investments side of the finance industry. These are the kind of numbers that really benefit from geographic visualization.

    A LQ tells us not where the most jobs are in any given industry, but how much of a state’s employment is clustered in the given industry.

    I’ve been following FortiusOne for a while but this is the first time I’ve gotten a chance to play around with their GEOCommons Finder! and Maker!, a new social production platform for agglomerating, sharing and visualizing geographic data. It’s a fantastic platform.

    Click on the map images here to explore them on the GEOCommons platform. You can see a lot of dark color in the rust belt, but at this point, the states of Indiana, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Iowa, Alabama, and Mississippi are at or ahead of Michigan and Ohio in state dependence on Manufacturing. Part of this is due to growth in the South and Great Plains, and part is due to manufacturing job losses in the Rust Belt, causing the concentration there to slip.

    Finance here is limited to Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial Investments and Related Activities (NAICS 523). Not surprisingly, this industry is clustered in the Northeast. You see Illinois, Minnesota, and Colorado shaded darker due to the role of Chicago, Minneapolis, and Denver as regional trade centers.

    Take some time to explore GEOCommons and some of the other visualizations created by others, and watch for more maps in this space as we do the same.

  • Geography of the US Auto Manufacturing Industry

    Talk of bailing out US automakers has dominated the news recently, and we all know that means Michigan. Michigan is home to roughly a quarter of the country’s auto manufacturing jobs, and the industry is in rapid decline there and in Ohio, but the state of automaking employment in the rest of the country may surprise you.

    The economies of Michigan, Alabama, Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri are the most highly dependent on auto manufacturing. While Michigan and Ohio have lost more than 43,000 auto jobs since 2001, Indiana actually added almost 3000 over the same time period and Alabama more than doubled its auto industry, adding 8600 jobs.

    In fact, the rest of the nation aside from Ohio held about the same number of automobile manufacturing jobs in 2001 as the state of Michigan. While Michigan has shed more than 35% of its employment in the industry, the rest of the country actually held its own over the same period.

    One major caveat – this source of BLS data is only current through the end of 2007, so it doesn’t quantify the effects of the recent credit market implosion. What it does show is a strong decentralizing trend in the auto manufacturing industry.

    Looking at average annual pay, the small vehicle sector in Minnesota leads the way – jobs there average over $100,000. At well over $90k per job in Michigan, you can see what the rapid decline in automaking has contributed to the evisceration of the state economy. In the top four highest paying states – where workers make more than $90,000 on average per year – automakers have cut more than one third of the jobs in those states since 2001.

    So while the failures of major automakers would send ripples throughout the North American industrial economy, what we are really contemplating here is doling out support for the declining states of Michigan and Ohio.

  • Average Annual Pay by State in the Automobile Manufacturing Industry, 2007

  • Employment in the US Auto Industry, 2001 – 2007

  • US Automobile manufacturing industry concentrations, 2007

  • Human Migration Through History

    Check out this video short produced by Imaginary Forces for the Lexus L Studio. The short features New Geography Executive Editor Joel Kotkin discussing the impact of human migration throughout history and how migration is changing for the future.

  • Nevada’s Decline

    A recent article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal lamented the economic decline in the state according to a report by the Rockefeller Institute of Government in NY. The Rockefeller report cited a growth index released by the Philadelphia Fed, but reset the index to a baseline of January 2007, singling out Nevada as the worst performing state in the nation over that period.

    Interested in the bigger picture, I looked up the original index from the Philadelphia Fed and charted it back to its original baseline of July 1992. The results show a much more interesting picture for the state of Nevada.

    We see a meteoric rise in economic activity in Nevada, far surpassing any state since 1992. Then as late as November 2007, the bottom began to fall out. The recent decline in Nevada is certainly serious, but we can always benefit by putting as much data into the picture as possible. What if the Rockefeller report had chosen January 2005 as a baseline? It would have shown Nevada as about flat, but obscured the detail of its true growth trajectory.

  • State Economic Growth Index, 1992 – 2008, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia