February 20, 2019

Are Wages Going Up In Your County?

Here’s something off the beaten path:

This chart shows the top and bottom ten counties ranked by their yearly change in average weekly wages (Q3 of 2017 to Q3 of 2018). The full dataset is here, so you can see how your  county is doing. Note that it contains only the 350 largest counties.

The winner is Chatham County, Georgia, which is Savannah and the surrounding area. The biggest loser is Elkhart, Indiana, home of Elkhart and next door to South Bend. Orange County, California, ranks 297th. Apparently my county isn’t doing all that great.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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