RALEIGH – If you had to guess which decades North Carolina led the nation in economic progress, what would you say?

Without ready access to the relevant data, you might just base your guess on your personal experience, or on the impressions left by political speeches and campaign ads. None of these is likely to be trustworthy.

As it happens, I was recently updating a spreadsheet I keep on personal income trends in the states going back to 1929. Over the entire period, North Carolina certainly did outpace the nation – both in personal income growth and in per-capita income growth, which factors out the role of population changes.

But North Carolina has not been a consistent top performer. Nor does our relative economic performance follow the standard script written by liberal historians and journalists. Since 1990, for example, North Carolina has lagged rather than led the nation in per-capita income growth. And our strongest relative performance was in the 1930s and 1940s, when state government was run by political conservatives (all Democrats, naturally) and our growth rate was about twice the national average.

The 1950s and 1970s were both periods of lackluster growth in North Carolina. The 1960s and 1980s were periods of strong growth. During the 1990s, the state’s per-capita income rose only modestly. During the past decade, it actually declined.

Using the personal-income statistic, which counts both population and income gains, the rates look a bit better but the relative performance doesn’t change. North Carolina grew at about double the national rate from 1929 to 1950, then had a weak decade in the 1950s. Our income-growth rate was 20 percent above the national average during the 1960s, 8 percent higher in the 1970s, 24 percent higher in the 1980s, 26 percent higher in the 1990s (that was mostly a phenomenon of population inflows, not growth per person), and only 5 percent higher during the 2000s (this time thanks entirely to population inflows, much of it from overseas).

Also, and I say this as a patriotic native of the Tar Heel State, South Carolina actually posted stronger growth during most of the last few decades than North Carolina did. A little less bragging is in order, not that politicians steeped in our state’s Blarney Tradition are likely to change their ways anytime soon.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.