Author: Charles Hayslett
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KFF’s national analysis matches TIGC’s Georgia findings on the Red-Blue Covid-19 divide
Research spotlighting the differences in how Red and Blue America are responding to virtually every aspect of Covid-19 continues to pile up: the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) went up yesterday with a report declaring that its polling had found “that political partisanship is a stronger national predictor of vaccination than other demographic factors.” I haven’t…
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Gauging the Gap between Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state on premature death rates
I’ve spent a good part of the summer taking a deep dive into several pots of economic and education data with an eye toward fleshing out a couple of chapters in the book version of TIGC. As a result, I’ve been neglecting the blog. Then, in mid-August, I got a call asking me to make…
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Broadband internet expansion no silver bullet for rural Georgia
(Editor’s Note: This column was initially published in today’s edition of the Georgia Recorder. It was submitted as a counterpoint to a piece that ran earlier this week in the Recorder.) Four years ago, I spoke to the opening day session of the House Rural Development Council about my research into the alarming decline of…
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Forget the “two Georgias,” welcome to Massassippi
I can’t remember whether he wrote it or said it, but years ago the legendary Atlanta Constitution editor Bill Shipp opined that if you lifted Metro Atlanta out of Georgia, what was left would be worse off than Mississippi. I remember it because I’m from Mississippi and my first reaction was: Really? There might be…
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Early TIGC notes on the 2020 election and the two political Georgias
Trouble in God’s Country’s preliminary take on Tuesday’s still-being-counted presidential election results: First, Georgia’s overall political map won’t change much if at all. President Trump, the Republican incumbent, and Democratic nominee Joe Biden are carrying the same counties their parties have carried in the past few election cycles, as this map illustrates. Trump will carry…
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Updating TIGC’s Gwinnett County-South Georgia comparison, Part II: Education
A week or so ago I published a post that looked at South Georgia’s population trends. This was the first of what will likely be four or more posts updating a December 2016 comparison between my 56-county South Georgia region and Gwinnett County alone. For the past few days I’ve been mucking around in various…
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Revisiting the Gwinnett County-South Georgia comparison (Part I)
I’ve made reference in at least one earlier post to my poor and often meandering research habits. Well, I’ve done it again. Recently I started thinking about updating a post I published in December 2016 comparing 56 South Georgia counties to Gwinnett County alone and somehow wound up researching global birth rates. It’s really not…
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Rural Georgia never recovered from the Great Recession. Now comes COVID-19
There’s a persistent pattern I’ve noticed in various buckets of economic, population, and education data, but I’ve never fully connected the dots or taken a stab at suggesting what it all might mean. Now seems like a good time to do that. Rural Georgia — and especially Middle and South Georgia — got the crap…
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Covid-19 may stir a perfect storm for rural Georgia
When I began work on this project some years back and came up with the title “Trouble in God’s Country,” I was thinking about things like the urban-rural divide in economics, education, healthcare, and politics. It never crossed my mind that a new plague might come along that would stir up what might be a…
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Three-fourths of Georgia’s GDP now produced north of the gnat line
About three months ago I stumbled onto a December 2018 report from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) that included four years of newly developed county-level gross domestic product (GDP) data. BEA billed that new set of data as a prototype and announced it would be coming out with an expanded report in December…