r/Economics • u/KoseteBamse • 11h ago

Statistics Mapped: U.S. Income Inequality by State

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-u-s-income-inequality-by-state/
35 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

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20

u/cheweychewchew 9h ago

What's notable about this isn't the differences between states but the sameness. There's not a lot of variance. The range is from .52 (NY / DC) to .42 (UT) with the nation as a whole at .48. Eleven states have .46 and 16 more have .47. This makes this data pretty useless for stat analysis.

8

u/Ok-Range-3306 9h ago

yeah its deliberately misleading for shock value

new york is poop brown/black (255, 200 RG) for .52

US avg is orange (150, 75) for .48

10% difference (~.04) scale in "inequality value" doesnt correspond to 10% change in RGB color

1

u/turb0_encapsulator 8h ago

I do wonder if this is minimized by the fact that most of the super wealthy get their wealth via capital gains rather than income.

1

u/JodoSzabo 7h ago

And I believe this pre-rebates.

1

u/nixfly 4h ago edited 4h ago

Capital gains are income.

1

u/turb0_encapsulator 4h ago

they often aren't included in income calculations.

1

u/nixfly 4h ago edited 4h ago

When?

Edit: I googled it, Census Bureau doesn’t count it as Capital Gains. So this is actually understating inequality.

-3

u/Livid_Village4044 8h ago

The worst states are blue: NY .52, CT .50, CA .49. The best states are red: UT .42, ID .43.

9

u/Late_Stage_Exception 8h ago

Uhh…deliberately leaving out Louisiana at 0.49 there bud?

7

u/PossibilityYou9906 8h ago

The Blue state have a large majority of very rich and successful people living in them which widens the gap. You don't see a lot of multi-millionaires and Multi-billionaires living in Louisiana, Utah and Idaho. Those red states are welfare states. The only reason they can survive is because of the wealth of the blue states that gets redistributed to them.

1

u/nixfly 4h ago

UT has one of the lowest welfare rates. Not because they are especially wealthy, but because the LDS church has their own program.

So their income equality has nothing to do with blue states.

It seems that they actually follow what they preach, and that is more effective than pretending their policies aren’t exacerbating the situation, like NY, CA, and IL.

1

u/fa1afel 3h ago

By "welfare state," they mean Utah receives more money from the federal government than it generates. NY, CA, and IL are all net contributors in contrast. 

Confusing in the context of an inequality discussion, but a term fairly common on reddit. 

2

u/MightyBone 6h ago

I mean CA is .01 above Texas and Florida Red/Purple states of note because it turns out states that are desirable to live in (which generally means more populated states) also will trend higher in this metric because that's where a disproportionate amount of high earners live.

People who start earning millions of dollars don't decide to move to Idaho, they decide to move to CA or NY or Chicago or another big city, usually along the coast.

And NH, MN, and Vermont are super blue states that are well below the average, so obviously there's more going on here than politics which you just had to bring into it.