Wednesday, March 24, 2010

I forgot how easy Oregon was: time for a break

After all that time where I was punching in data from all those southeastern states with lots of repeating counties...
I forgot how easy it is to put in data for Oregon's 36 counties.
So, as a little sidetrack from what I was doing:

Demographic data, as I have said sooooo many times, usually does not paint a clear picture. One of the clearest and most unfortunate pictures I have seen painted is that Hispanics are becoming America's new underclass. (I believe that America does have a class system, although I know many people disagree). Unfortunately, armed only with census data and open office, I can only diagnose the problem. Fixing it would take effort. And acknowledgment.
Ah, and after giving my speech, I will make a technical comment: high school rates also seem to have a lot to do with urbanization, (inversely), but here we see that urbanization doesn't seem to have a large impact: Multnomah and Clackamas counties are two of the largest counties, but they are far ahead of the rural, Hispanic counties in the upper left corner.

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