Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its annual report on the estimated costs of raising a child to adulthood. The 2008 estimate for a middle-income family clocks in at $221,190. (Read the AP story here.)

Before you wonder why the government is in the child-care expenditure business, here’s why the figures are important:

Issued by USDA each year since 1960, the report is a valuable resource to courts and state governments in determining child support guidelines and foster care payments. For the year 2008, annual child-rearing expenses for a middle-income, two-parent family ranges from $11,610 to $13,480, depending on the age of the child.

For the typical family in Oklahoma, the costs are slightly lower than the total estimates, most likely reflecting our lower costs of living. To raise a child to age 17, the USDA estimates that families in our region will spend between $149,610 to $346,320, depending on family income.

Here’s what the USDA estimates a typical family will spend their money on during the first 17 years:

The numbers also differ by income level. This chart shows that the highest-income families spend more than twice as much as the lowest-income families on child-rearing expenses:

In a somewhat understated aside, the report notes that it excludes expenses after age 17, with the largest being college or university education:

The expenditures also exclude costs made on children after age 17. One of the largest of these expenses is the cost of a college education. The College Board (2009) estimated that in 2008-2009, annual average (enrollment-weighted) tuition and fees were $6,585 at 4-year public colleges (in-State tuition) and $25,143 at 4-year private (nonprofit) colleges; annual room and board was $7,748 at 4-year public colleges and $8,989 at 4-year private colleges. For 2-year colleges in 2008-2009, annual average tuition and fees were $2,402 at public colleges.

Of course, the naked economics of quantifying a child’s life is alternately alarming and distasteful. So I’ll leave you with a few links to some recent psychological studies of how much children enrich their parents’ lives.

This report from a pair of British psychologists looks at the pleasures and rewards of time spent on daily activities:

In terms of pleasure, the results confirmed earlier findings, suggesting that we spend an awful lot of time doing things we don’t find pleasurable, including “work” and “shopping”. Out of 18 key activities, “time with children” and “sex” both came in around mid-table, far below “outdoor activities” and “watching TV”. However, consideration of the ratings for “reward” (as opposed to pleasure) told a rather different story, with “work” now the top scorer, and “time with children” not far behind.

Meanwhile, this report attempts to explain why children bring happiness even though everyone knows being a parent is hard work:

It is, on the other hand, much more likely that we as parents will end up spending a large chunk of our time attending to the very core process of child care such as ‘Am I going to be able to pick up David from his school in time?’ or ‘How do I stop Sarah from crying?’ Most of these negative experiences are a lot less salient than the positive experiences we have with our kids, which is probably why we tend not to think about them when prompted with a question of whether or not children bring us happiness. Nevertheless, it is these small but more frequent negative experiences, rather than the less frequent but meaningful experiences, that take up most of our attention in a day. It should therefore come to no surprise to us that these negative experiences that come with parenthood will show up much more often in our subjective experiences, including happiness and life satisfaction, than activities that are, although rewarding, relatively rare.

–Paul

USA Today has a fascinating story today on those questions, and more.

I’ll be the first to raise my hand and say that I can get a wee bit obsessive about tracking government information on the Web. After all, that’s part of my job description. But I hadn’t realized how much this story hit home until I thought about the time I’ve spent tracking purchases from Amazon or Apple. For example, when I bought my Apple laptop in 2005, I could track its movement from the factory in China to my doorstep in Oklahoma City. And I did. Obsessively.

Of course, I don’t think I’m quite to point where I track every instance of my life on the Web. That’s the subject of this story from Wired magazine. You can also check out The Quantified Self site here. And if you’re on Twitter, you can track your life using it with this project from data visualization site Flowing Data.

The prize for the most visually interesting personal metrics project has to go to graphic designer Nicholas Felton, who has been producing “annual reports” of his life since 2005. Here’s the latest cover from 2008:

Felton’s side project is called Daytum. The Wall Street Journal interviewed him for this story back in December. The Journal also helpfully put the phenomenon in historical context:

Today’s info-chroniclers are just the latest in a long history of diarists and scientists who kept notes by hand. Nineteenth-century English inventor and statistician Francis Galton, who introduced statistical concepts such as regression to the mean, was an obsessive counter who created the first weather map and carried a homemade object called a “registrator” to, among other things, measure people’s yawns and fidgets during his talks. (Mr. Galton’s preoccupation with data, specifically with human hereditary traits, also yielded an unsavory by-product — eugenics.)

In 1937, a social research organization called Mass Observation in London used about 2,000 volunteers to develop an “anthropology of ourselves.” For more than a decade, participants recorded such things as their neighbor’s bathroom habits and what end of their cigarettes they tapped before lighting up. Personal tracking also showed up in “Cheaper by the Dozen,” a 1948 book about efficiency experts Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth and their attempts to track and optimize the daily routines of their 12 children (including when they brushed their teeth and made their beds).

Finally, the award for too much information has to go to the squirm-inducing Bedpost!

–Paul

We included a number of charts with today’s paper version of the story. I also posted an online database on our Right to Know page so you can search the latest population estimates of almost 600 cities in Oklahoma.

Of course, the latest estimates showed continued growth in suburban cities. But growth was also fairly good in Oklahoma City, which gained about 45,000 people since 2000. That’s a growth rate of 9 percent. By contrast, Tulsa lost about 7,000 people, a drop of 2 percent, in the same time period.

There’s wasn’t much room in the story to go into detail on this point, but here’s a look at Oklahoma City and Tulsa population over the years 1920 to 2008. Both cities almost doubled in size in the years of the Oil Boom in the 1920s. The Dust Bowl and Great Depression then took their toll in the 1930s. By the 1970s, the cities were fairly close in size. The population gap has only widened since then.

Oklahoma City and Tulsa population, 1920 to 2008

Source: U.S. Census historical records

As for the other cities in the state, here’s a look at how they stack up in a bubble chart. The bigger the circle, the bigger the city. This helps you see the relative size of each city to others in the state. You can also select your city from the alphabetical list to the left of the bubbles.

Another type of visualization is a tree map. Here’s what the latest population estimates look like using a tree map. In this one, the boxes are relative to the size of each city, and the color shade shows the intensity of each city’s growth rate or decline.

–Paul

Now, less than 8 percent of the world’s population is 65 and older. That will increase to 12 percent in 2030 and 16 percent by 2050, according to census projections.

“This shift in the age structure of the world’s population poses challenges to society, families, businesses, health care providers and policymakers to meet the needs of aging individuals,” said Wan He, demographer in the Census Bureau’s Population Division.

China and India will continue to be the world’s most populous countries by 2050, but India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country in 2031, according to updated rankings.

Here’s a closer look at the U.S. projections:

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, International Data Base.

–Paul

The latest income numbers from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis spell it out in stark terms.

Since 2001, total income from jobs in Oklahoma’s energy sector has grown 125 percent. Put another way, those in the energy sector earned a collective $3.67 billion in 2001. By 2006, that figure had leapt to $8.26 billion–or roughly 12 percent of all income earned by those employed in Oklahoma businesses.

That’s as employment in what the government calls the Mining (oil and natural gas in these parts) sector grew to more than 70,000 in Oklahoma in 2006, up from 57,400 in 2001. And local energy companies continue to add jobs in the state.

On the other side of the coin, the state’s manufacturing sector lost almost 20,000 jobs from 2001 to 2006. Still, the jobs that are left tend to pay fairly well. Earnings in the manufacturing sector rose to $12.9 billion in 2006, up from $11.1 billion in 2001. Manufacturing jobs still account for almost $1 of every $5 earned by Oklahomans in the private sector.

More broadly, the bureau said per capita personal income in Oklahoma stood at $32,391 in 2006, an increase of 24 percent since 2001. Good news, certainly, but remember, they arrive at that number by dividing the total amount of income earned in the state by the number of people in the state. Since it’s such a broad measure, it includes the high and low incomes across all industries in the state.

The BEA’s measure of per capita income is just one of several used by government, academic and private sector economists. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey uses “money income” to figure its per capita income. That tends to result in a lower figure because it excludes employer contributions to pensions or insurance, and excludes government programs such as Medicaid or Medicare. (For a detailed explanation, click here.)

Some groups, such as Tulsa’s Community Action Project argue the income gains in Oklahoma–by whatever measure–are not being shared by all.

Drilling down into the BEA data by county also shows a very different picture of Oklahoma’s personal income growth from 2001 to 2006. Metro areas such as Oklahoma City and Tulsa show the highest growth; rural counties in the western half of the state post the lowest growth.

Of course, this is all in the past. The detailed, local 2007 numbers aren’t out yet, and none of these numbers reflects the current conditions in the Oklahoma economy, where consumers are dealing with higher gasoline and food prices.

Still, the broad economic indicators point to a more favorable picture here than in other parts of the country, especially those coastal areas where home price appreciation was the fastest. For more, check out The Oklahoman’s story from last Sunday.

You can also read Oklahoma State University’s latest Economic Outlook. (PDF link) In part, it said:

Our outlook for 2008 and 2009 remains basically
unchanged – that limited spillover from housing, a
smaller sub-prime concern, and the boost from high
energy prices will reduce the risk for the state in the
slowdown. We continue to believe that the primary
risk remains the indirect influence of slowing
national conditions.

However, the state is not immune to national
economic conditions and they have deteriorated
slightly faster and more deeply than anticipated in
our initial 2008 outlook.

To explore more from the BEA’s Regional Economic Accounts data, just click here.

–Paul