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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (35434)	4/19/1999 11:40:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

<<By the way, did you know that the Washington metropolitan area has the highest per capita income in the country? That came as a surprise to me, considering the high number of blacks in the area as a whole, not just in D.C. proper. That makes yet one more cliched generalization to throw in the dumpster.>> I think this is an example of skewed statistics more than cliched generalizations, really. First of all, according to the statistics I found, the Washington DC metropolitan area ranks second in per capita income in the country after Connecticut, not first, at least for 1997, which is the latest year for which I could find statistics by running a search for Washington vital statistics at the Ask Jeeves search engine, at askjeeves.com. Curiously, it also has the very highest poverty rate in the entire United States for 1997. 21.8% of its population lives in poverty. This is an explanation for the skewed per capita income figures: "In the Washington area, the number of working adults is high. This is because the area's women have the highest labor force participation rate in the nation. Additionally, the number of children per household is low in the Washington area; there are fewer dependents or non-workers being supported by the working population. The area also has a favorable job mix that has resulted in an above-average salary structure. The result is that per capita income in the Washington MSA exceeds the national average by approximately one-third." washingtonpost.com Like many large metropolitan areas, Washington seems to be at two extremes. Isn't the black population in the inner city about 98%? It would seem by the scarcity of white children attending, that the public schools are not very good, either. I am not really attacking Washington. I have really neutral feelings about it, and certainly there is a lot wrong with San Francisco, where I live. I do think that the experience of living in Fairfax County, Virginia is much different from a really gritty urban one, just as mine is living on a mountain by a forest high above the city. And I guess I am not very compelled by civic pride, or very sensitive to it, either.