County Rankings 101: A basic primer

Lately I’ve been updating several data sets and taking a fresh look at various county rankings.  Generally, I find the rankings systems a little frustrating because they tell you who’s best and who’s worst but usually don’t provide much help in the way of explaining the chasm between best and worst.

That said, the rankings systems are still sort of an unavoidable starting point in evaluating the relative standing of Georgia’s 159 counties.  In the process of updating all these rankings, I wound up mapping a bunch of the data and decided that all this might make for a fair primer on how Georgia’s counties stack up in terms of economic vitality, population health, and educational attainment.

A quick description of the rankings I’ll be using below in a table and in a map:

• Economics – For local economics, I rely on the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. DCA manages the state’s Job Tax Credit program, which is designed to steer jobs to the state’s poorest counties.  As part of that program, it ranks all counties in the state using a formula based on local per capita income, poverty rates and unemployment rates.  Because the JTC program is focused on helping poor counties, DCA ranks the counties from worst-to-best; for my Trouble in God’s Country purposes, I turn the reverse the JTC rankings and list them best-to-worst.
• Health – Here I used the 2019 county Health Outcomes Rankings produced by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s excellent County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program. This program produces county-level rankings for each state using a formula that factors in premature death rates and a variety of quality-of-life metrics.  (This program also produces a county-level Health Factors ranking, but that ranking includes a number of economic rankings that bump up against the DCA rankings above and the education rankings explained immediately below.)
• Education – I haven’t been able to find a comparable set of county-level rankings for education, so I’ve created one. Here I’ve taken the most recent educational achievement data I can find (for 2013 through 2017) and created a ranking by averaging the counties’ ranks for the largest percentage of college graduates and the smallest percentage of high school dropouts.

All that done, I’ve created what I call a “rank of ranks” by adding up each county’s economic, health and education ranking and then ranking them based on their totals (see the full list below).  I’ve also mapped that data in a way that slices the state into 16 tiers (creating 15 groups of 10 counties and one of nine counties).

The color-coding is simple: the darker the green, the better the overall ranking; the darker the red, the worse the ranking; the palest shades of green and red constitute the middling counties.  (You can access an interactive version of this map here.)

(You can find 16-tier interactive maps for the economic, education and health rankings here, here and here, respectively.)

The mapping is useful in a couple of ways, perhaps mostly by spotlighting regional patterns that are virtually impossible to see in a printed list.  For example, you can see, in dark red, five contiguous southwest Georgia that are all in the bottom 10 counties overall: Stewart, Quitman, Clay, Randolph and Calhoun.  At the same time, just south of those five counties, most of the counties strung along the Florida border have more middling rankings; they have at least some positive metrics.

So, one question, it seems to me, is this: If the state has finite resources to invest in economic development, does it invest them in areas that aren’t showing much signs of life?  Or in those that can demonstrate a pulse?  I’ll take a stab at an answer in future posts.

One of the obvious takeaways from the list below is that the economic, health and educational rankings tend to run fairly close to one another.  This is especially true at the top and bottom of the rankings; you’ll find some divergence in the middle ranks, and that’s where you’ll also find the most churn year in and year out.  Conversely, it’s difficult to dislodge counties that occupy the top ranks of these lists, and counties at the bottom have a tough time even getting a toe-hold to try to move up these ranking ladders.  These lists have not changed much in the time I’ve been watching them.

One frustration I have with these and other rankings is that they don’t answer what I call the “so what” question, and there are other metrics that I think would help create useful measures and rankings of the overall viability of Georgia’s counties.  I’m working on a few of those now and hope to be able to update this in the near future.

Here’s the list.   The sort is based on the overall rank, from highest to lowest.