The 8th installment in the series based on the original work by Charles Murray.
when Falling Apart: The White American Nation, 1960-2010 was published in 2012, I created a database of every zip code in the country using information from the 2000 Decennial Census. This included a socio-economic index score based on the percentage of adults with a college degree and median household income in each ZIP code. This played a major role in analyzing the extent to which elite Americans are concentrated in a small set of elite ZIP codes.
Since then, I've been regularly asked if there are any updates. I'll do it now. Data Tools #8 provides up-to-date information for 2010 and 2020, as well as “downdates” to 1970, 1980, and 1990. That is, half a century of socio-economic data using postal codes as the unit of analysis.
The database provides information about each postal code. Address, percentage of adults aged 25 and older with a college degree, median household income in constant dollars in 2020, socio-economic status index score in percentiles, total population, population and persons aged 25 and older. Breakdown of species. The Data Tools #8 documentation file provides details on these and other variables.
The sources of data are the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses, and 2008–12 (for 2010 data) and 2018–22 (for 2020 data). This is a 5-year compilation of the American Community Survey. The data was downloaded from Social Explorer, but there is a monthly fee for access. Data is also available for free from IPUMS USA, but it is not as convenient. The sample is limited to zip codes with at least 500 people aged 25 and older.
There are two general considerations. For 1970, we were able to find demographic and economic data for only 7,982 zip codes with more than 500 adults. This jumped to a nearly universal sample in 1980 (zip code 21,427) and has remained that way ever since. Second, most geographic descriptors for zip codes are based on the town or city that the United States Postal Service associates with a particular zip code. These can also be misleading. For example, the assigned post office town is outside the zip code, but actually contains another town within the geographic boundaries of the zip code. When I encountered a case like this, I replaced the town within the zip code with the town assigned by the post office. For the selected postal codes listed in the document, we manually checked the assigned towns against Google Maps' postal code map, and we believe a significant number of errors remain. Users who encounter such errors should notify us at the following address: [email protected] You can now enter corrections into the database.