A graphic showed up on Instagram recently containing an interesting factoid about the Gross Domestic Product of the United States. Pretty amazing, right? Actually, not as amazing as it seems. I did a little digging and found what is likely to be the source of this: a USA Today article from 2019, which includes this … Continue reading Shades of the Truth

It's axiomatic that reading to young children is A Good Thing. But how do we determine how often parents do this? One technique is to simply ask them. Here are the results of a few studies that did this: A Pew Research Center study suggests that "half of all parents with children under 12 (50%) … Continue reading Reading to Children

I take a drug called Ocrevus to slow the progression of multiple sclerosis. It's an immunosuppressive drug, the upshot of which is that I cannot receive live vaccines; the risk is that I would actually contract the disease I was getting vaccinated for. It turns out that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine is live, which means … Continue reading Mickey Measles

[Apologies for the resend - the table didn't show up in the email. You have to click on the title in the email (or the Continue Reading button) to view the correctly-formatted post in the browser] How do we spend our time? For twenty years the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics has tried to … Continue reading Time Isn’t After Us (take two)

[Apologies for the resend - the table didn't show up in the email. You have to follow the link in the email to get the correctly-formatted post] How do we spend our time? For twenty years the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics has tried to answer that, with a study called the American Time … Continue reading Time Isn’t After Us

This post continues looking at the migration data from the IRS. This data is based on tax returns submitted by individuals, which means that financial information is available. At each geographic level (nation, state, and county) the IRS includes not only the number of tax returns submitted, but the total Adjust Gross Income (AGI) of … Continue reading The Income of Movers

I've created a tool for visualizing cumulative state-to-state migration for the years from 2008-2022. Pick a state, and migration flow of interest (inbound, outbound, or net), and you'll get a graphical representation of the migration to/from that state. Here's an example - outbound migration from California (the darker the blue, the more migration there was … Continue reading Visualizing State-to-State Migration

I'll continue my look at the IRS migration data; specifically, state-to-state migration. I've got data for the past 14 years, so let's get digging. Here are the largest state-to-state migration totals for that period: FromToMigration, 2008-2022Reverse MigrationCaliforniaTexas989,744564,287New YorkNew Jersey859,094496,497New YorkFlorida851,938414,838CaliforniaArizona635,432402,452FloridaGeorgia609,691564,034CaliforniaNevada604,838356,971TexasCalifornia564,287989,744GeorgiaFlorida564,034609,691FloridaTexas560,271477,570CaliforniaWashington553,507384,579 Over this 14 year period, nearly a million Californians moved to Texas (and a half … Continue reading Moving on…

The IRS does a clever thing with the tax returns it receives. Each tax return has a tax payer ID and an address; the IRS uses this to figure out year-to-year migration patterns. The assumption being, when a tax payer reports a different address from one year to the next, this indicates that they moved. … Continue reading State Migration

I was perusing the voting results for Santa Cruz County and I stumbled across something weird. It has to do with a strange feature of this year's ballot: the U.S. Senate election for California. After Diane Feinstein died in September 2023, Governor Gavin Newsome appointed Laphonza Butler to fill her seat temporarily. By law, after … Continue reading Undervoters