FICO Scores In the US
FICO Scores In the US
The image is from a Washington Post article which took the data from an interesting research paper titled Who Pays For Your Rewards? Redistribution in the Credit Card Market.
The research paper is a good read. (A free PDF of the whole paper is available at the link.) It examines how the use of rewards credit cards results in a massive wealth transfer from low-credit-score customers to high-credit-score customers:
We estimate an aggregate annual redistribution of $15 billion from less to more educated, poorer to richer, and high to low minority areas, widening existing disparities.
The Washington Post article attempts to frame the clear north-south split as a result of healthcare issues in the south. That explanation seems too narrow to me. This map looks too similar to maps of poverty and education, and we know health correlates strongly with both of those issues.
Edit to fix a sentence fragment. Sorry; it was late and I was tired.
Interesting data but I hate this map. The colours are nonsensical as are the categories
Maybe they're more color-blind friendly than the typical red-green scale? Idk, it's just a guess as to why these colors were chosen.
As a red green colourblind person this map looks awesome and the contrast is excellent
For fully color blind people I wished they could just do black to white with shades of gray in between.
I like the colors. Much nicer than typical colourscales
Yea who the fuck designed this color scheme. And the data points being so....random? Why not go by 50 or 100...
Could be a choice to reflect the distribution of different scores. I can't imagine credit scores are a very linear distribution.