Take a look at this map depicting the U.S. at night. What should be immediately obvious is that there are a lot of bright lights exactly where the richest people live: the East Coast megalopolis from Boston through Washington, D.C., Midwestern burgs such as Chicago, Southern cities such as Atlanta and the West Coast conurbation that goes by the name Los Angeles.
Inspired by this association—and others revealed in night time images that stretch back to the mid-1960s taken by the U.S. Department of Defense—economists, sociologists and other scientists with an interest in economic development have begun to explore whether nighttime lights might help reveal the relative richness of regions for which standard economic data is lacking. With that in mind economist William Nordhaus of Yale University and sociologist Xi Chen of Quinnipiac University parsed "luminosity" data from 1992 to 2008 for a wide range of countries world-wide—and even sub-regions within those countries.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Observations: Do Bright Lights Mean a Big (Economic) City?
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