Rural Level of Living Indexes for Counties of the United States, 1940

Excerpt from the report: The planning of agricultural programs calls for recognition of the wide differences within the country - differences in levels of living as well as differences in agricultural resources and in types of farming. To meet the needs of agencies concerned with differences in levels of living of rural people, several indexes of level of living were developed during the last decade. These indexes were an attempt to indicate in some simple form the relative level of living in each county of the United States for families on farms, as well as for other rural families not living on farms. They have combined into one composite measure data provided by the 1930 Census on various items which represent goods, services, or other sorts of satisfactions available to rural families. These indexes have served to indicate areas where programs for adjustment of population to agricultural resources are needed. They have afforded a means of investigating the relationship of level of living not only to type of farming and physical resources, but also to population characteristics such as migration, fertility, and mortality. To provide a more current measure of this important component of rural welfare for wartime and post-war planning, as well as for scientific analyses, data from the 1940 Censuses of Population, Housing, and Agriculture have been combined into an index of average level of living for the rural-farm families of each county of the United States and into a similar index for the rural-nonfarm families.