Category · 5 articles
Economics
Local economies, industry mix, labor force participation, and the structural forces shaping U.S. metro areas.
What you'll find here
Articles in Economics sit at the intersection of public data and lived experience. Every piece starts from a specific Census table, traces the number back to the household-level question that produced it, and then asks the harder question: what does this actually mean for the people, places, and markets it describes?
We avoid the two failure modes of most data writing: throwing a chart on a page and assuming it speaks for itself, or over-interpreting a single year of estimates as a trend. Where a finding warrants caveats — margin of error, geographic crosswalks, ACS1 vs ACS5 trade-offs — those caveats are in the body, not buried in a footnote.
Featured
6 min read
How to Read the ACS5 Margin of Error (and When to Ignore the Number)
Every ACS estimate ships with a margin of error. For small ZIP codes that margin can be larger than the estimate itself. Here's how to tell when a number is solid and when it's noise.
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6 min read
How Long Americans Commute, by ZIP Code
Average one-way commute time in the U.S. is 26.8 minutes. The variation by place is dramatic, and tells you a lot about local infrastructure and density.
5 min read
FIPS Codes, ZCTAs and the Plumbing of U.S. Geographic Data
If you've ever tried to join Census data to a map and gotten lost, the problem is almost always a FIPS or ZCTA mismatch. Here's the plain-English guide.
7 min read
Labor Force Participation: The Census Number That Predicts Local Economic Health
Unemployment gets the headlines, but labor force participation rate is the truer signal. Here's what it measures, and what high or low LFPR means for a city.
6 min read
How City Zip Compare Builds Its Rankings
Every ranking on this site is reproducible from public Census data. Here's exactly how we compute them, what we include, and what we exclude.