Let me start off by saying that I might be the US Census Bureau’s biggest cheerleader in Washington. I love their surveys, I love their longitudinal studies, and I wish they would get more funding from Congress to do more huge surveys and studies – rather than unceremoniously dumped on by politicians who don’t understand the Census Bureau’s worth to the American public.
Unfortunately, the interpretation of those surveys by the new wave of ‘data journalists’ and otherwise leaves something to be desired. Let’s take a look at data usage in this Huffington Post article titled “The South Is Essentially A Solid, Grim Block Of Poverty.” Ignore the awful title for now, I’ll get there in the end.
Poverty areas are places where more than 20 percent of the people live below the federal poverty line, which varies by family size. For a family of four, the poverty line in most states is an annual income of $23,850.
Using the federal poverty level is an often inescapable issue for those of us who deal with Census data. Unfortunately, the FPL is an atrocious measurement, because it’s way too low (it’s based on food costs from the 1960s) and doesn’t vary by locality or any factor other than family size. Take it from my friends who moved from Arkansas to DC that it’s slightly more costly to make ends meet in Washington. On the other hand, people in places like New York or Washington typically earn more than people in the South to make up for this. In an upcoming post, I’ll argue that the FPL’s continued use in the policy world is really to keep as many poor people as possible from receiving benefits in a pseudo-scientific manner, not to make any sort of statement about material deprivation.
Of course, the Census Bureau is far from stupid. The statisticians at Census know that the FPL sucks and that’s why they’ve created and continue to calibrate the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which takes into account more sources of income like SNAP or housing assistance and cost-of-living adjustments when measuring material deprivation. However, the American Community Survey doesn’t include the SPM or ask respondents the questions that would be needed to accurately compute it, only the Current Population Survey’s Annual Socioeconomic Supplement does. Unfortunately, the ASEC’s sample size isn’t large enough to permit accurate analysis below the state level in many circumstances.
Today, 25.7 percent of all Americans live in such areas, up from 18.1 percent in 2000, according to the report.
Not “today.” These numbers come from the American Community Survey’s latest 5-year sample, which covers surveys collected from 2008 to 2012. Here, 2010 is used as a stand-in because it’s the year in the middle, but it’s not really what’s being measured. 2010 is no more represented in this sample than are 2008 or 2012.
These multi-year samples are necessary because the 1-year sample simply does not have enough respondents to make probabilistic statements about geographical regions under a certain population. You really need the huge number of respondents from five years of the survey to get down to neighborhood-level analysis.
The years that are in the sample really matter. The Great Recession didn’t officially end until late in 2010, so this sample is still heavily skewed towards respondents who answered the survey during the height of the downturn. The sample from 1998-2002, meanwhile, short-handed as 2000 in the above article, would have been skewed towards the tail end of 1990s prosperity and not the early 2000s recession which began in 2002.
Another thing Southern states have in common is Republican political leaders that have spent the past decade shrinking the social safety net.
It’s not just the Republicans, though it’s so easy to blame everything on them. Most states in the Deep South also have completely dysfunctional (and dead broke) Democratic parties (for example, see this post from The Southern Lawn on the Alabama Democratic Party).
Despite strong grassroots support from progressives, women, and people of color seen in the Moral Mondays in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South, southern Democratic Parties seem to be not only completely incapable of turning these into electoral victories at any level, but also seem to actively work against grassroots advocates, running conservative candidates whose platforms rarely touch on those issues that have gained popular momentum.
I don’t necessarily think the thrust of the article is incorrect, but I think most people would agree this point was conceded long ago. Yes, we get it, the South is poor. Maybe media outlets like the Huffington Post should stop piling on with maps and start reporting on why that is – beyond the trite and largely useless “Republicans did it!” – and what to do about it.
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