Tucker County, West Virginia is the least diverse place in America. Cue the eye rolls.

Randy Olson — a true “data visualization” guy — put in some work on the diversity of every county in the United States. There’s some detail on it here, and on his own blog here. Here’s how the process worked:… Continue Reading

Birmingham, Alabama is where college grads are the most segregated from everyone else, eh?

Birmingham has a pretty checkered history with another type of segregation, but now here comes some new research around the segregation of college graduates from everyone else within a given metro area. This is vaguely similar to previous research on cities where rich people… Continue Reading

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Let’s compare the 10 largest occupations in America in 1999 and 2013, shall we? (Pause for sigh.)

Before, we’ve talked about where jobs might be come 2022 — so eight years or so from now. But what’s happened to jobs in the past decade or so? Well, check out this chart, courtesy of Pew: Here’s the original… Continue Reading

What are the biggest differences between what the rich and poor spend money on? (And what can that teach us?)

I saw this article the other day and I was interested; here’s why. I grew up in the 10128 zip code — one of America’s richest — then ended up teaching elementary school in 77013 — one of America’s poorest.… Continue Reading

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Where do low-income residents tend to live together the most? (As well as high-income residents.) Er, San Antonio and Memphis.

Cities have become increasingly economically segregated in the last decade or so, according to various studies (for example, this one). There’s been some pretty substantial discussions about this and what it all means across the Internet by people far more… Continue Reading

Could a $25 Firefox OS phone be a true game-changer in terms of linking up the developing world?

The Mobile World Congress is going on right now in Barcelona and Firefox OS (Mozilla) believes it’s “unleashing the future of mobile.” Here’s the big corporate money-shot in the press release: “Firefox OS is off to an amazing start. We launched… Continue Reading

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Across America’s 50 largest cities, the lowest inequality is in Virginia Beach

Here’s a new paper from the Brookings Institution looking at inequality — what the 20th percentile of earners in that city made in 2012 vs. what the 95th percentile made, and then calculating a ratio — in the 50 largest United… Continue Reading

African-Americans don’t own the welfare rolls, and do more community service than almost anyone. Can we start having a more real dialogue about race?

That video above is hopefully an outlier, but it’s also some guy telling Nightline that blacks and Jews are, disproportionately, “predators.” This is 2014. We have an African-American U.S. President — and have for about five years — and we’re probably going to have… Continue Reading