Lab Notes

If Minnesota competed in a pageant, it might take the “Optimism” crown—if that were even a thing. The Ground Level Survey that we recently completed with Minnesota Public Radio News found that 82 percent of Minnesotans feel hopeful about the state’s future. What’s more, most Minnesotans feel the state is on the right track on an array of issues. At the high end of agreement, 85 percent of Minnesotans feel the state is on the right track when it comes to “providing safe drinking water,” followed closely by “protecting lakes and rivers for things like swimming, boating, and fishing” at 80 percent.

“I don’t know off the top of my head. Lowering taxes.” That was one response to the broadest open-ended question on the recent MPR News | APM Research Lab Ground Level Survey. The question was about change. It asked: “If there is ONE thing that you would like to see changed in Minnesota to improve our state, what would that be?” But “lower my taxes” strikes me as a simplification. While reading through all of the responses, I was taken by how many people wanted a change that would require taxes.

Did you know that 17,000 residents of Tennesseans speak Arabic? And 177,000 residents of Illinois converse in Polish? Just as glaciers transformed our nation’s physical landscape thousands of years ago, the immigration patterns of the past three centuries—right up to the present—have left their mark on the varied linguistic patterns across the United States.

Of all Rhode Island children enrolled in preschool, the percent in private settings dropped five percentage points between 2015 and 2016. Or did it? When a change is “statistically significant,” we can be reasonably confident that the change is real. We use statistics to help us understand an entire population from a sample. Think of a pot of chicken noodle soup. Assuming the pot is well-stirred, you can make a pretty good estimate based on one ladle of soup.

For Minnesota, 2016 brought greater gender parity in worker earnings than any other year this decade or the last. Among full-time, year-round workers, women earned 83 cents for every dollar earned by men (median earnings). This is a nickel more than the scenario in 2010.