Community Corner
The Most 'Normal' Place in America is Found in CT: Report
The "normal" America isn't a small rural town anymore, at least according to one economic analysis.
Editor’s Note: Patch is re-running this popular story in case you missed it the first time around.
Written by RICH SCINTO (Patch Staff)
“Normal America” can be hard to define, but an economist has used some statistics to peg the New Haven and Hartford metro areas as the new normal for the country.
Jed Kolko writing for FiveThirtyEight used age, educational attainment, race and ethnicity to measure metro areas demographics compared to the U.S. overall with a demographic similarity index.
Turns out the typical 2015 America isn’t the setting of a Norman Rockwell painting or Superman’s fictional hometown of Smallville, Kansas, according to his analysis.
He found that the New Haven-Milford metro area (93.2) was the most similar to the America of today followed by the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Fla. area and Hartford-West Hartford- East Hartford came in third (90.2).
Census results show that the country is less white, older and more educated than it was in the mid-20th century.
In 1950 the United States was 89.5 percent white and in 2010 it was 72.4 percent, according to the U.S. Census. Only 16.5 percent of people identified as anything other than non-Hispanic white in 1970. In 2010 that figure was 36.3 percent and it is projected that more than half of the population will identify as something other than non-Hispanic white by 2042.
America is also getting older. In 1950 the median age was 30.2 and in 2010 it was 37.2. By 2050 it’s projected to be 39.
The country is also becoming much more educated than it was in the past. Five percent of the 25-years-old and older population had a bachelor’s degree in 1940, 11 percent by 1970 and 28 percent by 2010, according to the census.
Kolko notes that America’s idea of “normal” affects the political process.It’s a rite of passage for every presidential hopeful to chow down on a corn dog at the Iowa State Fairearly in the primary process. Iowa as a state is ranks 37th on Kolko’s list for being demographically similar to the United States as a whole.
Read the full FiveThirtyEight analysis here.
Image via Insomnia Cured Here/Flickr Commons
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