Sinners are red, Midwesterners are blue...

Posted at 4:16 PM on October 9, 2009 by Jeff Horwich (3 Comments)

...Mapping the Sins is a Hard Thing to Do.

For the new podcast episode, we put a call in to Mitchell Stimers, a geographer at Kansas State University, who helped create maps showing (sort of) the distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins across the U.S. Listen (six minutes or so):

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Comments (3)

All those elderly people in FL causing trouble!

Just kidding! :)

I am very interested in the few points where the high and low levels touch or are closely separated without the middle range in between. I wonder what the cause is.

Posted by Patrick Oden | October 9, 2009 7:15 PM

I think the greed map is a load of what have you. The coal fields of WV, the West Texas oil fields and the meth and dope growing/producing regions of the Ozarks are somehow free from greed. Methinks there were some foregone/faulty conclusions used to provide a basis for this map.

Posted by Brendan | October 9, 2009 8:51 PM

In the interview, the guy explains how they calculated "greed' -- it's an index of income inequality, basically. In the areas you mention, I can understand why they'd come out blue: WV, the Ozarks, and the (mostly vacant) Texas oil fields probably are short on the high-income-earners who would tend to skew an area red. It's a valid question whether you'd call that measure a perfect measure of "greed," but he'd be the first to cop to that.

Posted by Jeff Horwich | October 12, 2009 3:25 PM

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