October 2024 Round-up

At the end of each month, the AGS team looks back at articles and blog posts that we saw this month that stood out to us. Some are from news agencies, and many come from our partners, but not all use our data. Here is the round-up from October 2024. Kalibrate With the...

The American Community Survey

The decennial census of the United States is a constitutionally mandated function of the federal government, the main purpose of which is the apportionment of representatives. Over time, the scope of the census questionnaire was generally expanded, and in 1940, the...

Lies, Damned Lies, And Crime Statistics

Just a few weeks ago, the moderator in a presidential debate ‘fact checked’ one candidate’s assertion that crime rates were going up in the United States, citing the 2022 Uniform Crime Report (UCR) which said the opposite. The news recently hit that upon the release...

Store Closures Present Possibilities

7-Eleven, Walgreens, TGI Fridays, Big Lots, True Value. These are all American mainstays in the retail and restaurant worlds. Yet, all have recently announced massive store closures in the last few weeks. While it is sad that the stores are closing, it also presents...

The New AGS Consumer Expenditure Model

For many years, one of the primary complaints that we have heard about small area consumer spending models, from any of the major data vendors, is a lack of variance. Look at the percent of total expenditures at the block group spent on any category, and there is much...