The map above draws any of 1,147 statistics onto six levels of American geography: states, metropolitan areas, counties, ZIP codes, census tracts and cities. Choose a statistic from the panel, switch the level of geography beneath it, and click any area to see its figure, how it ranks, and the survey it came from.
Income, rent and house prices; race, ancestry and country of birth; age, household size and marital status; education, occupation and industry; health, insurance and life expectancy; commuting, broadband and vehicle access; elections, farming, weather and business counts. Every one is mapped from a published federal or academic source, and every one carries the year and the margin of error behind it.
States answer broad questions and nothing else; counties are the level most federal data is published at, and the one most of this atlas uses. ZIP codes and census tracts go finer, down to a few thousand people, which is close enough to a neighbourhood to be useful and small enough that the survey's margin of error starts to matter. The map says which it is showing, and the inspector gives the error alongside the figure rather than behind it.
The American Community Survey and the decennial census supply most of it, with the CDC, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Department of Agriculture, the FBI, NOAA and the EPA supplying the rest. Nothing here is modelled from another model, and nothing is scraped from a site that will not say where it got the number.