The current controversy over Texas’ redistricting of their congressional districts–to increase fairness, or to legislate Democrats out of existence–depending on your partisan political point of view, makes me nostalgic. You see, in the late 80’s I still harbored an ambition to attain a Master’s degree in Geography to go with my Bachelor’s degree in History.
History was what I had studied to launch my writing career, much to my father’s benign neglect. Geography was what I used to launch my much more successful career as a software engineer, having been lured in by the appeal of analyzing satellite imagery (called Remote Sensing in academic speak) using FORTRAN and statistics.
After 2 years in grad school, I had completed all my coursework and passed my qualifying oral exam in front of the whole department, lacking only a graduate thesis and had long since attained a good-paying full-time job writing code for the DoD that only tangentially involved Geography.
It would seem a simple thing to do, but these things never are. My quest was complicated when my would-be thesis adviser, the Remote Sensing professor, had died of a stroke at the ripe old age of 46 a few years earlier. Geography embraces a wide range of studies from Physical Geography (think Geology), Cultural Geography (think Sociology) to Cartography, and the University didn’t see the need to replace their only Remote Sensing professor with another in the same specialty. So that left me scrambling to find a thesis topic that didn’t involve Remote Sensing.
I thought I saw an easy topic that I might convince my Economic Geography professor to sponsor me for. In the late 80’s there were a ton of papers written about the migration of jobs from one part of the US to another, poetically characterized as Sun Belt vs. Rust Belt.
Everybody knew the dichotomy made sense, but there was only one problem, nobody seemed to agree on which states were in the Sun Belt and which were in the Rust Belt. Most agreed that the states of the old Confederacy were (mostly) in the Sun Belt and most of New England with their steel and auto factories was in the Rust Belt. But where did that leave Arizona, Washington, Oregon, and especially California?
Some papers would actually list the states they categorized, but most sought refuge in vagueness, so their papers lacked any smattering of scientific rigor. I figured it was ripe for an investigation involving statistics. As it happened the young professor I had targeted as an advisor took another job as a professor at the University of Kentucky (fleeing California for a more traditional Sun Belt state? You decide.)
That left me with a friendly professor in Cartography. Since the 1990 Census was coming up, my thoughts turned to redistricting, something I could use both my coding and statistical skills on. I did preliminary research and found out there are only 3 actual legal requirements about redistricting. Each district was required to be contiguous, compact, and equal in population. Contiguity was either true or not, and population was fairly strictly scrutinized although there was obviously a certain amount of variation on the noise level that was allowed. Compactness was usually the criteria that was most easily messed with and most obvious from maps (Yay Geography!). I had worked with digital Census maps and data early on in my career, helping AT&T break up the telephone company monopoly, so I had a good grasp on what could be done.
Preliminarily, I proposed seeding the state with a central point for each of the required districts and then running a thousand iterations on the computer, growing each district randomly, census block by census block, among all the ones that physically touched each other. There would be complications that I would have to work out of course, but the idea was to be able to analyze the results to see how well they matched the government-proposed redistricting efforts that everybody presumed would be influenced by politics rather than the three legally required factors.
Alas, that proposal never got off the ground for reasons having nothing to do with its merit that I explain in my work biography. Maybe some enterprising young grad student will read this essay and decide to actually make it happen. Then, mirabile dictu, maybe the results will actually influence the way Congressional districts are redrawn in the future. As a friend used to like to ask, “Who can say?”
Musings of a Restless Mind 