Mutual Entropy Interactions Between Growth Patterns of Oregon Counties

Shannon's mutual information is proposed as a measure of lagged statistical dependence between the temporal patterns of economic/demographic growth for subregions, where the year-to-year ratio of births is taken as the growth index for each subregion. Application of the measure to 31 of the 36 counties in Oregon, using vital statistics for the years 1919-1968, yields results that seem, for the most part, consistent with certain theories about the diffusion of economic development.