As some TIGC readers know, I’ve been concentrating lately on stirring my research into some kind of semi-coherent book form. As part of that process, I’ve been updating a lot of data, and fairly regularly I run across buckets of numbers that are worth a quick post.

This is one of those times.

Over the past few months, I’ve updated my county-level files for per capita income, educational attainment, and premature deaths. For each of those measures, I’ve been able to rank every Georgia county nationally; I’ve also sliced those national lists into quartiles and put together maps showing which quartile each Georgia county fell into for PCI, educational attainment, and premature death.

With those rankings done, I decided to combine those rankings and put together the 2025 Trouble in God’s Country County Rankings. That’s what you’ve got here. I’ll probably follow this up with some additional context and commentary, but for now (with a couple of exceptions) I’m going to let the data speak for itself.

That said, you’ll probably need a little explanation to make sense of the interactive map below and the sortable table below that. In that table, I show the national rank for each county in each of the three categories, as well as their national quartile for each category. I also show their state rank. I calculated that by averaging their national ranks and then sorting the list based on those averages.

That exercise put Forsyth County at the top of the list. Nationally, it ranked 171st for PCI, 40th for educational attainment, and 38th for premature death, which gives it an overall average of 83. At the bottom of the Georgia heap you’ll find Hancock County, an impoverished, majority black county in east central Georgia. For PCI, it ranked 3,066th out of 3,114 U.S. counties; for educational attainment, it came in 3,114th out of 3,143 counties; and for premature death, it finished 2,868th out of 2,905 counties. That made for an overall average of 3,016 and put it in 159th place in Georgia.

One unexpected byproduct of this exercise is that it enabled me to slice the state into deciles. This gets a little geeky, so bear with me. Basically, I grouped counties based on the sum of their national quartile rankings. Counties whose national rankings put them in the top quartile in each category had a national quartile rankings total of 3, the lowest and best possible total. Sadly, Georgia has only five counties that made that cut — Forsyth, Cherokee, Cobb, Fayette and Oconee.

At the other end of the spectrum are counties whose national rankings put them in the bottom quartile in all three categories. Also sadly, 53 Georgia counties fell into this group — one third of our total 159 counties and more than any other group. Walk through this exercise and you wind up with 10 groupings — hence my decile split. In the sortable table at the bottom of this piece, as mentioned, I show not only the category rankings, but the national quartile for each ranking, and then the national decile ranking. The table at right shows the number of Georgia counties in each national decile and the total population in each group of counties.

One recurring theme in my recent analyses has been that Georgia invariably has a disproportionate share of its territory (e.g., counties) and population mired at the bottom of just about any national socioeconomic list you can identify. Based on the latest data available, we have more counties in the bottom national quartile for per capita income (104) and premature death (72) than any other state in the nation; we have 81 counties in the bottom national quartile for educational attainment, second only to Texas.

Another recurring theme has to do with Georgia’s socioeconomic performance versus North Carolina. I began noticing some time back that North Carolina was outperforming Georgia on a number of fronts and, in particular, that it seemed to be doing a better job of lifting its population out of the bottom-most ranks for every socioeconomic metric I’ve studied. I’ll flesh this out in a follow-up piece, but this table should give you a hint of things to come.

Probably the most obvious takeaway from these two tables is that North Carolina has only seven counties in the bottom national decile versus Georgia’s 53, and well under half as many people (the two states have nearly identical populations). Another takeaway: North Carolina has nearly nine times as many people living in top decile counties as in bottom decile counties. In Georgia, the ratio is only about 1.5:1. I would submit there are economic productivity and social service cost implications to those numbers.

This interactive map illustrates the national decile rankings for Georgia’s counties. I use my usual dark green to dark red color coding, and you can find the exact decile and state ranking for each county by mousing over the map. The best socioeconomic performance is concentrated, of course, in the Metro Atlanta region, and especially in the northern suburbs. The worst performance, also of course, is in rural Georgia, and not just south of the gnat line. One emerging story in this data is the extent to which weak performance in all these categories — economic, education, population health — has spread up the eastern half of the state in recent years.

The following sortable table gives you the national rank and national quartile for all 159 Georgia counties, as well as their national decile and state rank.

I plan to be back soon with follow-ups on various aspects of this data.

Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2025