Persistence of regional economic disparities

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Strange Maps has this cool picture of Polish election results compared to the pre-1914 partition border:

poland_2007_election_results_1.jpg

I can’t tell what the colors represent, but it’s striking nonetheless. In linking to it, Matt Yglesias writes,

History’s impact can often be surprisingly long-lasting. It’s been a long time since taking midwestern agricultural products via train to Chicago and then by boat across the Great Lakes, across the Eerie Canal, down the Hudson, and to the port at New York was a major element in the American economy. But we still have two giant cities in Chicago and New York . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if the German-run bit of Poland was richer in 1918 than the rest of it, and that the differential has persisted since then. By the same token, we can expect the East Germany part of Germany to remain poorer than the West Germany part for a long time.

Here are some graphs that I posted a couple of years ago and that found their way into chapter 5:

stateincometrends.png

More pictures here (for those of you who haven’t bought the book yet). For the book, we cleaned up the graphs a bit, but the general point remains, that the states that are rich and poor now are the ones that were rich and poor 80 years ago.

5 thoughts on “Persistence of regional economic disparities”

  1. The dark, medium and light are, respectively, a majority, a plurality of over 40%, and a plurality of under 40% for one of the two major parties. Orange is Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, PO) and blue is Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PIS). The other colors are other parties.

    The colour series are repeated dark to light: first orange; then blue; then the non-differentiated colours of the other parties. In two-party maps like those of US elections, the colour series are often shown back-to-back on the legend, and at first I was surprised that wasn't done here. Then I thought that that can't be as easily justified where there are more than two parties.

  2. Hi,
    greetings from Poland. The redder the region, the more liberal the vote (PO is the pro-european, liberal party currently in power). Blue regions represent the influence of PIS, a right-winging conservative party with strong anti-european and catholic background. The blue region has been partitioned between Austria and Russia from 1793 to 1918, when Poland regained independence, the orange has been under Prussian occupation. The partitions lasted for 123 years. The chart is remarkable, but it repeats itself in all kinds of statistics. The map of railroads in Poland, income distribution, the results of the referendum about joining the EU, the echoes of distant history are still there. The red-orange region in the middle of the blue is the capital city of Warsaw and its surroundings.

  3. The map reminded me of this analysis of how county-level Southern voting patterns in the 2008 U.S. presidential election correlate with historic farming settlement patterns. (And, correspondingly, with the Cretaceous coastline of North America!)

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