Green with envy: a stark snapshot of the wide divide in wages earned by residents of the state's urban and rural counties.

AuthorOtterbourg, Ken
PositionPOINT TAKEN

My old pickup, the one that burned up in an unsolved case of suspected arson, didn't have a radio. And so during long drives, I would keep awake by trying to remember all of North Carolina's counties. The whole Alamance-to-Yancey shuffle is no small feat.

I've always liked the fact that we have exactly 100 counties. So much of government, when you dig deep enough, seems nearly random; South Carolina, for example, has 46 counties. One hundred has the ring of careful consideration. Plus, it makes calculating percentages really easy.

There's this map that's been making the rounds among journalists and political types. It shows that residents in only five North Carolina counties have average annual incomes exceeding the state average of $45,000. The people who live in the other ones--i.e., 95% (easy math!)--don't. The five counties include Forsyth, which is slightly above the average. The other four, Mecklenburg and the Triangle counties of Durham, Orange and Wake, are each at least 10% above the average, in vivid green. Against the rest of the familiar wedge of North Carolina, shown mostly in gray, they peer out like haunting eyes.

This is a map of income inequality. It was pulled together by Ted Abernathy, an economic-development consultant in Raleigh, for a presentation to a legislative committee earlier this year. The data is from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it is a disturbing snapshot. We are a state of haves and have-nots.

Now, it's not as if we needed a map to learn that fact, but graphics have a way of organizing information into a compelling narrative.

Abernathy says he was surprised the map has received so much attention. It's been tweeted and shared and blogged about. It's simply a snapshot, he notes. In addition, he suspects that North Carolina isn't alone in this sorting and that most other states would have a similar grim income profile. He hadn't run the numbers, but I did. He's right. Across the Southeast, our peer states show a similar breakdown (figuratively and literally) in income. States in the Midwest are a bit less skewed.

In and of itself, income inequality isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most would agree that surgeons ought to make more than bank tellers (or magazine columnists). But there is a tipping point, where the inequality is codified and stratified in a manner that prevents the vast majority of people at the bottom...

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