Mapping Human Development Index in the US

Hi – I’m with the team that developed the American HD Index and the maps; thanks a lot for the compliments! We would love to be able to get more granular with the data we present by disaggregating our data by county, zip-code, Census tracts, etc… however the issue we’ve run into is that reliable and up-to-date data on health, income, and education from the sources we rely on are simply not produced for these units of analysis for the entire country. Congressional districts are one way that we can examine sub-state disparities in well-being (in all but the 7 states that only have one house rep) across the country using units that contain roughly the same numbers of people. Congressional districts also often do map meaningfully onto parts of urban areas and parts of states with important commonalities and have the added benefit of making it easy to draw a link between indicators of well-being on the ground and the policy-makers who are accountable for these conditions. Thanks for your interest and for reading this far into a perhaps overly-lengthy explanation…