Mapping the Evolution of the West
The U.S. West Coast: what’s not to love? It smells like citrus (at least near our office) and everybody wears sandals — even our CEOs. In the current issue of Pacific Standard, we took aim at the West—the people and their paychecks—to quantify a few ways in which it defined the latter half of the “American Century”.
Click the graphic below for a breakdown of the ways the West won the last 50 years. For example: In population, growth in California, Washington, and Oregon has been more explosive than in major East Coast cities in recent decades; in terms of aggregate compensation of employees, manufacturing workers on the West Coast took in nearly 20 percent of all US compensation for that industry, which overall paid out more to employees in every other industry all the way until our most recent recession; not to mention all the silicon out here, from California’s Valley to Washington’s Puget Sound.
From the cutting room floor, some other ways the West Coast surprised us…