US counties — commuter flows dominate

County-level GTP drill (3,258 counties; commuter-flow tells the story).

An interactive county choropleth is planned; the drill-down below is live.

3,258 counties, part of FAND’s growing subnational coverage below the national balance sheet. Same balance-sheet identity. At this scale, the cross-border story is commuter flows — income earned in one county, spent in another. The economic reality most Americans actually live.

Why counties matter

A bedroom suburb and its downtown neighbor look almost identical on a GDP map — production is captured where the work happens. But on a wealth map they diverge sharply: Manhattan accumulates produced assets and financial wealth; Bergen County accumulates household wealth (housing, education, retirement claims) that the Manhattan-earned income built.

You cannot see this dynamic at the country scale. You cannot see it at the state scale. You can only see it when the unit of measurement is small enough to be on one side or the other of a commuter flow.

The county-level crosstab, through the national lens

The Global Leaves crosstab places every country’s finest administrative unit on a world-population-weighted grid. Refit that same density × per-capita-income grid to just the 3,112 US counties it can price, and the picture changes:

5x5 crosstab of density quintile against per-capita income quintile, fitted to 3,112 US counties only, showing population in millions and unit counts per cell
Almost the entire country reads as globally "rich" — refitting the quintiles within the US alone surfaces a mild anti-diagonal (denser counties trending richer, ρ = 0.070) that the global lens can't show. The measurement asymmetry persists at this scale too: 2,057 counties describe 44M sparse Americans; 157 counties describe 144M dense ones.

The deferred-maintenance overlay

FAND’s Deferred Maintenance (DM) term — the trust-infrastructure deficit exposed when transfer income is stripped from Substantive-Income-based county wealth — floor-binds unevenly across the same grid. It isn’t the same story as density × wealth; it’s the institutional-thinness story layered on top of it.

Two 5x5 crosstabs: percent of counties where the deferred-maintenance floor binds, and population-weighted mean deferred maintenance per capita, both by density and per-capita-income quintile
Poverty predicts institutional thinness (Q1 Poor runs 33–100% floor-binding across every density row) and sparseness carries its own penalty even among rich counties (45% floor-binding, $69K per-capita DM in Sparse+Rich resource-extraction counties). Dense+Rich counties never bind — 24 counties, 32M people, DM = $0.

What’s here at launch