Planet Money "Modal American"

Data and code behind Planet Money "Modal American" episode, which aired Aug. 28, 2019. Analysis by Ben Casselman, Kenny Malone, Liza Yeager and Darian Woods. Comments/questions/corrections to Ben Casselman.

Data: American Community Survey, five-year public-use microdata (2013-17), via IPUMS USA, University of Minnesota.

There are four files in this repo:

1. final_analysis.R contains the main code for parsing the data and replicating the analysis used on the episode.
2. density_analysis.R contains supplementary code for calculating the tract-weighted population densities of each Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA).
3. puma_density.csv contains the output of density_analysis.R for those who don't want to replicate that section of the analysis. The records are ranked in order of descending (logged) densities.
4. final_results.csv contains the results of the analysis, as used in the episode. (This lists all 3,433 buckets, ranked by descending order of the population in each bucket.)