Have a look at this map.
I love maps, and when I was a kid I thought of becoming a cartographer. I can spend hours looking at atlases, Google Earth, etc. In fact I have found Google Earth to be a wonderful companion to reading books about history. You can visualize the terrain the author is describing.
Anyway, I saw this map linked from an article on Reason Magazine’s website: Washington’s Wealth Boom: The D.C. metro area is getting richer every year. That’s a problem for the rest of America. – Reason Magazine. As you can see they were concerned about the concentration of wealth around the nation’s capital.
You see this map paints the wealthiest counties in the USA red. The statistical anomaly I noted was the areas which we tend to think of as “vacation” spots: The San Juan Islands in Washington, The Lake Tahoe region, the areas around Sun Valley Idaho, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Park City Utah, the Colorado ski towns of telluride, Aspen, Vail, etc. Outside of LA, SF & Seattle they pretty much make up the “rich” areas of the Western US… exclusively.
So does this mean the wealthy are not just vacationing there anymore, but have taken up permanent residence? Or was the data collection flawed? Interesting to think about.
(BTW: Can anyone explain the one county in SE Alaska? I thought the rich folks live in Anchorage?)
Hmm…Colorado has more richy counties than Hawaii? Than Tejas???
Go figger….
Interesting…the looong skinny east-to-west county is Arapahoe, and it stands to reason it’s among the richest, as that’s where the majority of the gated communities are (Walls to keep OUT the riffraff, like me!). However, the rich mountain towns are not identified (I think) by this map, give Aspen and environ’s county, Pitkin, isn’t red (again, I think, the map being a bit small for my eyes to be 100% sure).
Surprising is, NONE in Nebraska, home of Warren Buffet, and NONE In Arizona, john McCain’s home state. Odd.
And the lone richy county in the soutwest of the state?
That’s where Steve Forbes, Ralph Lauren, and Ted Turner have LARGE land ownings…:)
I’m like you, CG…my favorite part of NatGeo mags are the maps..I’ve saved nearly all of them for over 25 years now! Google Earth should be illegal at work, where I have a HUUUGE, gummint-sized Internet pipe to ‘google oogle.”
Your tax dollars at work!
yeah i also like maps … did a cartography course as part of my degree – amazing the different ways of presenting data in graphical form – not just maps
the Google apps are so useful in my work with locations of equipment round the country – couldn’t do without them now…. and as you said Chuck – you can go visit the areas in books and history – great!
Jerome
I’m also a fellow map lover (I also read phone books but that’s another story) -just as well as I’m the navigator on the Mad Dog rally team. The rich county or “borough” in Alaska is Juneau. It’s the capital and that’s where the politicians live…(no I didn’t say corrupt!)