The face of U.S. demographics is changing. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the central point of the U.S. population U-Hauled from central Indiana to Phelps County, Missouri—about halfway between Springfield and St. Louis on U.S. Highway 44—between the years 1900 and 2000. In the decade preceding the turn of this last century, it shifted a distance of 324 miles further west and 101 miles south as people moved out of the densely populated Northeastern states to warmer and more economically friendly climates.

Businesses moved with them. Between 1996 and 2006, according to the ALEC-Laffer report Rich States, Poor States, nonfarm payroll employment in Nevada grew by 52.0%, the highest rate in the U.S. and well above the national average of 13.4%, followed by Arizona (39.7%), Idaho (30.8%), Florida (29.7%), Utah (26.0%), Wyoming (25.1%) and Texas (21.7%). The states with the lowest levels of job growth include such traditional industrial areas as Ohio (2.8%), Illinois (4.3%), Indiana (4.7%) and Michigan which had 0.3% fewer jobs in 2006 than in 1996. When Wyoming’s state government realized they had more jobs than workers, they advertised in Michigan; and so many automotive manufacturing jobs have moved south that the Atlanta division of the Federal Reserve tracks the statistics independently from other industrial sectors.

Representative government trailed along, too. Following the 1990 census, 19 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives were reapportioned, moving from the Northeastern and Midwestern states to—you guessed it—the South and West, with California, Florida and Texas gaining political clout and New York, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania losing it. Another 12 seats followed in 2000 and an additional 14 are projected to shift in 2010 according to POLIDATA.

Work Is Where the Heart Is

Another factor doing cosmetic surgery on U.S. demographics is the explosion of telecommuting and home-based businesses. In 2005 the Census Bureau counted 20.4 million non-employer establishments, mainly one-person or mom-and-pop shops, out of an estimated 149.3 million civilian workers. While it’s certainly possible that some number of these people still hold their day jobs, the most requested form on the IRS website is the W-9, the taxpayer identification form for contractors.

Yet another telling statistic comes from the Department of Labor which in 2004 estimated that 20.7 million people, both employees and the self-employed, regularly perform all or part of their work from home rather than at a centralized worksite. With the wide availability of email, cell phones and teleconferencing, more and more people find they don’t need to live near their employers or clients. While some urban workers are moving downtown to cut their commutes, subdivisions are also springing up in the West Texas desert near Big Bend National Park, as far out of a city as it’s possible to get. (Check e-Bay; it’s for real.)

Falling Behind

Have U.S. economic indicators been left behind in this shifting landscape?

Take Standard & Poor’s Case-Schiller Home Price Index as an example. It’s widely used as a barometer of home values at the national level; however, what it actually does is measure changes in house prices in 20 selected metropolitan areas. These are mainly located in traditional industrial and business centers such as New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago, the areas of waning influence in the U.S. economic landscape. Leaving aside the entire issue of an exploding housing bubble, of course these areas are losing value—along with population, jobs, business opportunities and House seats.

So why does Standard & Poor’s, no fools when it comes to analysis, continue to monitor house values in Minneapolis, Cleveland and Detroit while ignoring those in Houston, the fourth largest city in the nation and still growing? Good question.

Or there’s the manufacturing survey, a monthly questionnaire sent to regional CEOs which gives an excellent snapshot of that area’s industrial health and expectations. The press squawked over the poor figures in the recent Empire State Manufacturing Survey when more CEOs reported declining levels of shipments and new orders than those reporting increasing ones. On the survey’s June 16 release date, the U.S. dollar fell against the currencies of Switzerland, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the Eurozone and crude oil surged to a record price of $139.89 per barrel. But when Federal Reserve branches in Dallas, Richmond and Atlanta all reported more positive results, nobody peeped.

The most significant aspect of any regional indicator is the level of influence it commands within the national and international frameworks. So perhaps our current population of economic indicators should shift their demographic boundaries, too.