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| Mudslide blocking a road in Cayey, Puerto Rico, on Sunday. Photo by AP via Wisconsin Public Radio. |
Really interesting radio thing, on a study from 2018
Akey, Pat and Dobridge, Christine and Heimer, Rawley and Lewellen, Stefan, Pushing Boundaries: Political Redistricting and Consumer Credit (March 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3031604 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3031604
in which researchers found that abusive partisan redistricting—gerrymandering—has economic effects, and pernicious ones: it makes it harder for people in the gerrymandered district to access credit.
Really, you ask? Yes, really; not across the board, those who are well off can always get a loan, but for those around the margin, without much of a credit history, there's a real empirical difference in whether your legislators are in safe, gerrymandered seats or competitive ones where they have a good chance of losing the next election. That's likely to be the reason:
