The Topline: The asymmetric fraying of America’s social fabric

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Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: Auto insurance rate hikes; data that debunks a Minneapolis myth; education and social connection; the geography of octogenarianism.

Minnesota auto insurance rates might jump by 50% next year

CBS News reports that Minnesota is one of three states where car insurance rates could jump by more than 50% next year. The data comes from Insurify, a car insurance shopping website. Normally I’d be extremely skeptical about this sort of thing, but if there’s one thing I’d expect a place like Insurify to have decent data on, its car insurance.

The report notes that weather-related claims, like hail damage, are at least partly driving the expected rate hikes. It also says that drivers in Maryland have the highest overall insurance rates, which makes sense given that they are some of the worst drivers in the nation .

New survey data debunk Minneapolis migration myth

The Star Tribune reports on a new study from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve showing that migration patterns in and around the Twin Cities during the pandemic years were pretty much the same as they were in the three years prior. It’s a finding that undercuts a persistent conservative argument that the metro is turning into a dystopia that people are abandoning in droves.

The data also show that people in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods were less likely to move away from the Twin Cities during the pandemic

Overall the data shows that 64% of people living in Minneapolis in 2020 were still there by 2023. That’s virtually identical to the share (65%) who stayed between 2016 and 2019.

One quarter of Americans without college degrees have no close friends

Here’s a finding from the Survey Center on American Life , a project of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, that stopped me in my tracks: Back in 1990 it was virtually unheard of for people to say that they had no close friends, with just 3% of the population saying that was the case, according to Gallup polling.

Today that number has increased by roughly sixfold, to 17%, and it shows a stunning educational divide: 24% of those without a college degree report being essentially friendless, while just 10% of those with a college education say the same.

Conversely, fully one-third of college grads say they have at least six close friends, while just 17% of high school grads do.

Another way to look at this: People without a college degree today are more likely to say they have no close friends than to say they have six or more.

That’s just one finding from the survey, which polled more than 6,000 Americans on their social connections and found major educational divides on virtually all of them. College grads are more likely to spend time in public spaces, to hang out with neighbors, to be members of sports leagues and community groups, to be married, and even to be members of a church.

Four decades ago, many of those numbers were flipped. For virtually any social phenomenon happening today — the aggressive nationalist turn in Republican politics, the growing prevalence of conspiracy thinking , deaths of despair , or the fracturing trust in institutions , to name a few — a plausible argument could be made that it stems from the asymmetric fraying of these social connections.

Where people live to be 80 or more

If you’re a frequent reader of this column you’re probably familiar with the general contours of life expectancy in the U.S. — higher in the North and on the coasts, lower in the South. Someone on Reddit recently took those numbers and flattened them into a binary choice : Is the life expectancy in a given county at least 80 years, or no?

The resulting simplification is fascinating. For instance, there isn’t a single county in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi or Alabama where life expectancy is at least 80. Conversely, there are a handful of states, mostly in New England, where people in virtually every county live that long.

Then there are a couple oddities like Tennessee, Kentucky or West Virginia that have one isolated pocket of octogenarianism amidst a sea of people whose lives are shorter.

You don’t want to make too much of these differences — 80 is a completely arbitrary cutoff as far as biology is concerned — but it’s always fun to view familiar data in a different light.