Techniques for the visual display of quantitative information just keep getting better.
Check out this interactive map from Forbes. Says the reader who sent it to me:
It shows how Americans move from county to county. It shows direction (are they going or coming), location (where do they go or come from), and relative net volume of those moving (dark black = heavy inflow; dark red = heavy outflow). This probably shows where the jobs are.
I noticed that people in metro areas come and go from far away, but people in smaller towns don’t move very much or very far from or into a town. Compare Louisville, KY (Shelby Co.) vs. New Albany, IN (Floyd Co.) across the river. Compare Boise Co. ID vs. Salt Lake Co. UT. And by the way, people are leaving California in droves.
Many thanks for that, Sir. People seem to be fleeing my own county of Suffolk, N.Y., like critters from a forest fire; but that’s in large part a visual illusion, as the inflow is from close at hand — mainly from New York City — and so is harder to see than the outflow, which is to the West Coast and Florida. That’s what I want to believe, anyway. If it’s not the case, the value of my house must be heading down towards single digits.