![least populous county in us least populous county in us](https://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/5b9c84f9d379fb1fc9dd8fc000ee9cdf46534348.jpg)
![least populous county in us least populous county in us](https://cdnph.upi.com/sv/ph/og/upi/5741639003459/2021/1/124f7494db69f30f38a6bc54e349c808/v1.5/Omicron-variant-another-hit-to-mental-health-of-exhausted-US-population.jpg)
What may be more surprising is where the high-diversity pockets are: in major cities, yes, but also in Alaska, apparently. The least diverse county, according to Olson's calculations, is in West Virginia, followed by two counties in Kentucky and ones in Nebraska and South Dakota. Vermont looks to be the least diverse state in the nation. Some things weren't surprising at all, like the fairly homogeneous swaths of the Northeast and the Midwest. Like the nation's population, the results were mixed. He explains it on his blog like this: "A county will come out with high entropy when all six ethnic categories are as even as possible (i.e., each ~16.7 percent), whereas it will come out with low entropy if the county is only inhabited by people of one ethnic category." He ranked the counties according to how evenly split their populations were between the six categories of race tracked in the census.Įach county has a breakdown of race by percentage-i.e., Montgomery County, Maryland, is 49.3 percent white, 16.6 percent black, 0.2 percent Native American, 13.9 percent Asian, 17 percent Latino, and 3.1 percent "other." Olson quantified diversity by calculating entropy for each of these sets. But Olson wanted to combine the data to see how and where the different demographics mix. There are three more of those-for Native American, Asian, and white (non-Hispanic) populations. African American population by county (%), according to the U.S.