United States Median Household Income by State

A number of people suggested that my United States passport ownership map wasn't measuring passport ownership as I thought, but income.

With a little data analysis, it turns out they are right. Below is the scatter graph of median income vs percent passport ownership:

(By the way, does anyone know how to label the points in a scatter plot on Google Spreadsheets?)

The correlation analysis gives 0.86 – just about as correlated as you ever see real-world results.

The full data as follows:

State	Median Income	Rank
MARYLAND	$69,272	1
NEW JERSEY	$68,342	2
CONNECTICUT	$67,034	3
ALASKA	$66,953	4
HAWAII	$64,098	5
MASSACHUSETTS	$64,081	6
NEW HAMPSHIRE	$60,567	7
VIRGINIA	$59,330	8
DELAWARE	$59,290	9
CALIFORNIA	$58,931	10
WASHINGTON	$56,548	11
MINNESOTA	$55,616	12
COLORADO	$55,430	13
UTAH	$55,117	14
NEW YORK	$54,659	15
RHODE ISLAND	$54,119	16
ILLINOIS	$53,966	17
NEVADA	$53,341	18
WYOMING	$52,664	19
VERMONT	$51,618	20
WISCONSIN	$49,993	21
PENNSYLVANIA	$49,520	22
ARIZONA	$48,745	23
OREGON	$48,457	24
TEXAS	$48,259	25
IOWA	$48,044	26
NORTH DAKOTA	$47,827	27
KANSAS	$47,817	28
GEORGIA	$47,590	29
NEBRASKA	$47,357	30
MAINE	$45,734	31
INDIANA	$45,424	32
OHIO	$45,395	33
MICHIGAN	$45,255	34
MISSOURI	$45,229	35
SOUTH DAKOTA	$45,043	36
IDAHO	$44,926	37
FLORIDA	$44,736	38
NORTH CAROLINA	$43,674	39
NEW MEXICO	$43,028	40
LOUISIANA	$42,492	41
SOUTH CAROLINA	$42,442	42
MONTANA	$42,322	43
TENNESSEE	$41,725	44
OKLAHOMA	$41,664	45
ALABAMA	$40,489	46
KENTUCKY	$40,072	47
ARKANSAS	$37,823	48
WEST VIRGINIA	$37,435	49
MISSISSIPPI	$36,646	50

Data from the United States Census Bureau.

The Problems With First Past the Post Voting Explained

(This video is a part of the 'Politics in the Animal Kingdom' series)

Here is my first attempt at a video where I'm directly trying to be understood, rather than give an overview of all the complexity I don't expect anyone to remember. Feedback would be much welcome, as I'm afraid this one might be a bit… dull.

However, if it goes well I'd like to expand politics in the Animal Kingdom to include some other topics, such as the two mentioned in the video and things like federalism. Suggestions welcome.

Unrelated to anything, I really wanted Elephant to be my centrist candidate, but I'm going to keep it intensionally unrelated to real politics. Zebra was my second choice but, after growing up in the United States and living in London for the better part of a decade now I have rather schizophrenic problems with the pronunciations of some words. Also, for future editions, I'm looking for a good, public domain or creative commons attribution photo of a narwhal. Anyone have one? Flickr came up dry.

In case it's not obvious enough from the video, I'm a big supporter of the Alternative Vote Referendum and the Yes in May Campaign.

Credits

Images by: Billy Lindblom, digitalART2, Brian Snelson, Hamed Saber, audreyjm529, Shawn Allen, xlibber, Andrea Allen & Marie-Lan Nguyen.

Music by: Kevin MacLeod.

How Many Americans Have a Passport?

Blog

One of the things I’ve often heard while living in the European Union is the meme that only 10% of Americans own a passport.  This assertion is usually followed by the quazi-urban legend that George W. Bush never had a passport before becoming president.  This I’ve never been able to prove or disprove any satisfaction Which, it turns out, is not true.

Such a low number wouldn’t have surprised me. After all, the United States is nearly thrice the size of the EU and borders only two foreigncountries, while the EU is made of 27 countries and -- depending on how you want to count them -- borders another 19.

I wondered aloud about this in my previous post, ‘Work in Progress: The United States Explained’ and a commenter, Alison, was nice enough to bring this data set about passports from the ever-awesome data.gov to my attention.

The data was only for the past four years, so I had to do some estimates based on issue rates and the 2000 census numbers, but the result is the above infographic and the table below:

State

Population with Passport

NEW JERSEY

68.36%

ALASKA

65.01%

MASSACHUSETTS

63.42%

NEW YORK

62.47%

CALIFORNIA

60.19%

NEW HAMPSHIRE

59.39%

CONNECTICUT

58.50%

WASHINGTON

57.28%

VERMONT

56.32%

MARYLAND

56.21%

MINNESOTA

56.14%

COLORADO

54.88%

RHODE ISLAND

54.40%

FLORIDA

52.83%

ILLINOIS

52.06%

MAINE

51.62%

ARIZONA

51.24%

HAWAII

49.94%

UTAH

49.36%

VIRGINIA

49.16%

TEXAS

48.80%

NORTH DAKOTA

48.30%

NEVADA

46.84%

MONTANA

46.63%

PENNSYLVANIA

45.11%

DELAWARE

44.93%

WISCONSIN

43.70%

OREGON

43.39%

MICHIGAN

42.89%

WYOMING

41.40%

IDAHO

41.24%

IOWA

39.34%

NEBRASKA

38.97%

GEORGIA

38.73%

KANSAS

38.18%

SOUTH DAKOTA

37.69%

NEW MEXICO

37.11%

OHIO

35.71%

MISSOURI

35.32%

NORTH CAROLINA

34.18%

OKLAHOMA

33.23%

INDIANA

32.73%

SOUTH CAROLINA

32.09%

LOUISIANA

29.47%

TENNESSEE

28.78%

ARKANSAS

25.14%

ALABAMA

25.03%

KENTUCKY

24.94%

WEST VIRGINIA

20.43%

MISSISSIPPI

19.86%

(If you’re the kind of person who really cares about the details, you can see all the calculations on my United States data spreadsheet please let me know if there are any errors)