The Geography of High-Paying Jobs in the US | Hacker News Reader

The Geography of High-Paying Jobs in the US

theatlantic.com

33 pointsacangiano18 comments

Fun to see these kind of maps, but they are pretty useless without a discussion of purchasing power in those areas. The Bay Area and Bos-Wash all have above average cost of living too...

Agreed. I'd be more interested in seeing average salary by region contrasted with the average cost of living for those same regions, which would identify the most economical places to live in the US.

Agreed as well, ratios would work well, even though there are fixed costs that are virtually identical across the country. Because of such expenses, a higher income in an expensive place may still have an edge over a lower income in a cheap place, if the ratio for the former is only slightly less than the ratio for the latter.

Hm, (Income - Cost of Living) / Purchasing Power?

I vote for:

(average income - average COL) / average COL = relative purchasing power

I don't think so. That would be

  p=(i-c)/c

or just

  p=i/c-1

which would mean that purchasing power is directly proportional to cost of living.

It's also fairly hard to find a good "cost-of-living" metric that accurately reflects what a given individual's cost of living would be, because how you'd live isn't identical between regions. For example, I've lived in both Houston and the Bay Area, and in the Bay Area I pay considerably more for housing, but considerably less for entertainment. The latter is due to most of my entertainment in the Bay Area being free outdoorsy stuff (hiking, beaches), whereas most of my entertainment in Houston was for-pay indoor stuff. That, and more of my trips in the Bay Area are nearby driving trips (up/down the coast, etc.), while most of my trips from Houston were by plane--- and I took more of them, because I didn't have as nice local weather, nice nearby hiking, etc. The end result is that I spend almost exactly as much overall, despite the higher COL by most metrics.

This sounds like a job for wolfram alpha...

I wonder if there is a simple direct correlation between purchasing power and any one of those specific class segments.

Eh, I actually think that for Entrepreneurs, income is more important than average income minus average expenses.

The thing is that yeah, a room in a shared house in San Jose is going to cost you twice what it costs elsewhere... but it's still only $700 a month.

Yeah, as I get older and start a family, I'll care more about the cost of a reasonable standard of housing... but while I'm bootstrapping and willing to live in a place that is beneath my means, I think average income matters more than average cost of living.

Since the wage data is publicly available, does anyone know how I would go about replicating these maps? I know I could use Google's charting API's for County/US state level, but how would I go about mapping data at the US county level?

Just always wondered how that would work :)

You can download the bounds of each US county (and many other political subdivisions) as shapefiles from the Census TIGER/Line repository. http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/

These types of maps are often created with ArcGIS. It usually ships with county, state, and word data.

http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/index.html

FloatingData, "How to make a US County thematic map using free tools" http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-th...

It would be interesting to see how this correlates to population density. Also, college density.

Population density: http://www.mapofusa.net/us-population-density-map.htm

There is obviously some correlation. I find it hard to tell just by looking how much of the variance that explains.

It would be my instinct to group health care and education jobs in the service category rather than the creative class category.

So the answer is SF, DC, and NY. Call me shocked.

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