Disaggregating the economy: cost of living

Timothy Taylor writes,

here are the US states color-coded according to per capita GDP with an adjustment for Regional Price Parities: that is, it’s a measure of income adjusted for what it actually costs to buy housing and other goods. With that change, California, New York, and Maryland are no longer in the top category. Hoever, a number of midwestern states like Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and my own Minnesota move into the top category. A number of states in the mountain west and south that were in the lowest-income category when just looking at per capita GDP move up a category or two when the Regional Price Parities are taken into account.

Taylor’s post indicates that the Bureau of Economic Analysis has some very interesting data on output and prices down to state and local levels. This would really help with a project of disaggregating the economy. Here is a recent press release about the data.

12 thoughts on “Disaggregating the economy: cost of living

    • Agreed, that would be a nice map. Heck, within a single city things move dramatically block to block.

    • The report has data for a large number of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, and I was able to deply my leet BEA skeelz and use the Interactive Tables feature to generate a map similar to what you describe.

      City block granularity would just use the local MSA data and correct by some kind of real estate index that captured the quality adjusted rent per sqaure foot or something.

  1. The multi-verse theory of economics, again. The multi-verse theory has about nine independent regional economies, a single central banking for all of them will not work.

  2. “…per capita GDP…”
    A map that dis-aggregates by income as well as geography would be nice-if you could see what the typical janitor, electrician, and physician’s income vs. cost of living is compared to other typical janitors, electricians, and physicians living elsewhere, i.e.

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