Wages, Wilderness, and Wal-Mart

AlterNet: The Disjointed States of America

Those post-2004 election maps that showed a blue "United States of Canada" draped over a big red "Jesusland," witty as they were, painted only an incomplete political picture. Leaving aside the usual election-year fascination with scandal, abortion, sexual orientation, and fear of foreigners, I took a more analytical approach, computing the relationships among states' rankings for eight different economic and environmental characteristics. Based on those rankings, I've bent and stretched the red-blue map in some new directions.
I compiled rankings of the 50 states for a range of characteristics, including wages, taxes, and energy costs from a recent Forbes Magazine's survey entitled "The Best States for Business," an environmental policy ("green-capacity") rating by the Resource Renewal Institute, and government data on median income, income inequality, population size, and the number of Wal-Mart Supercenters relative to population. Then I fed the data into a statistical procedure called "principal component analysis" to produce a different kind of US "map":