Daily Score Blog

It’s high times for the Northwest’s economy, right? Stocks are soaring. Our region’s GDP is up too. But the prevailing gauges provide a crooked accounting of how the economy affects ordinary people.

So to straighten out the books, Sightline’s Cascadia Scorecard 2007 (just released today) shows that the Northwest’s economic security is scarcely better off than it was more than a decade ago. For all the attention that we give to our pocketbooks in our personal lives, policymakers have little information about the financial security of working families.

Consider, for example, median household income, an excellent gauge of middle class well-being.

Since the mid-1980s the Dow has risen nearly tenfold, and real economic output in Cascadia has more than doubled. By comparison, middle-class incomes in the region scarcely budged. (And keep in mind that the Dow has virtually no bearing on most people’s pocketbooks: the wealthiest fifth of Americans own 90 percent of all stock-market assets, while the bottom three-fifths of Americans own a scant 3 percent.)

So what does a more accurate gauge -- the Cascadia Scorecard -- tell us about economic well-being? It's a different story:

• Median income isn't much higher today than it was in 1990. After adjusting for inflation, it’s slightly higher today than it was in 1990, yet it remains several thousand dollars below its 1998 peak. In British Columbia, the picture is grimmer: although median income has improved a bit recently, it's still roughly 6 percent lower than it was in 1990.
• Many northwesterners still face precarious economic conditions. After years of ups and downs, by 2005 (the most recent year of complete data) the poverty rate remained unchanged from 1990, while the child poverty rate was slightly lower and the unemployment rate slightly higher.

The 2007 edition of the Cascadia Scorecard, the Pacific Northwest’s annual progress report, reveals that the region lags behind world leaders on trends such as energy, sprawl, and economic security.

The good news is that we are making progress—and adopting smart solutions will accelerate those gains. Seattle Times has called the Cascadia Scorecard "a pioneering attempt to assess life in the Pacific Northwest across a broad array of measures." Launched by Sightline Institute in 2004, the Scorecard aims to assess the region’s progress in key trends shaping its future, and to provide an alternative to one-sided measures such as the Dow Jones industrial average and GDP.

The new book is chock full of maps and charts.

Press materials, data supplements, state breakdowns, and solutions -- along with the full book -- are available for free download here.

(Listen to the KUOW story on gasoline trends.)

One of the most striking findings from this year’s Cascadia Scorecard (just released today, by the way) is that northwesterners are using less gasoline. In fact, per person gas consumption on the Northwest’s roads and highways has fallen by nearly a tenth since the late 1990s.

To put the recent declines in context: cutting gas consumption by nearly a tenth is equivalent to each driver taking a one-month holiday from driving each year.

At this point, the average resident of the US Northwest uses less gas than at any time since 1967.

Of course, the region’s population has increased, so the trend in total consumption isn't quite as rosy: rather than declining, total consumption has remained roughly flat for the last 8 years or so. But even that represents a huge break from the preceding decade and a half, during which gas consumption rose roughly in tandem with population.

Apparently, sharp price increases since the late 1990s–when gas prices, adjusted for inflation, were at all time lows–has prompted a number of changes in how we get around town: