Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?
Annie Lowrey writes in the Times Magazine this
week about the troubles of Clay County, Ky., which by several measures is the
hardest place in America to live.
The Upshot came
to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each county in the United
States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree),
median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy
and obesity. We then averaged each county’s relative rank in these categories
to create an overall ranking.
(We tried to
include other factors, including income mobility and measures of environmental
quality, but we were not able to find data sets covering all counties in the
United States.)
The 10 lowest
counties in the country, by this ranking, include a cluster of six in the
Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky (Breathitt, Clay, Jackson, Lee,
Leslie and Magoffin), along with four others in various parts of the rural
South: Humphreys County, Miss.; East Carroll Parish, La.; Jefferson County,
Ga.; and Lee County, Ark.
We used
disability — the percentage of the population collecting federal disability
benefits but not also collecting Social Security retirement benefits — as a
proxy for the number of working-age people who don’t have jobs but are not
counted as unemployed. Appalachian Kentucky scores especially badly on this
count; in four counties in the region, more than 10 percent of the total
population is on disability, a phenomenon seen nowhere else except nearby McDowell County.
Remove
disability from the equation, though, and eastern Kentucky would still fare
badly in the overall rankings. The same is true for most of the other six
factors.
The exception is
education. If you exclude educational attainment, or lack of it, in measuring
disadvantage, five counties in Mississippi and one in Louisiana rank lower than
anywhere in Kentucky. This suggests that while more people in the lower Mississippi
River basin have a college degree than do their counterparts in Appalachian
Kentucky, that education hasn’t improved other aspects of their well-being.
As Ms. Lowrey
writes, this combination of problems is an overwhelmingly rural phenomenon. Not
a single major urban county ranks in the bottom 20 percent or so on this scale,
and when you do get to one — Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit —
there are some significant differences. While Wayne County’s unemployment rate
(11.7 percent) is almost as high as Clay County’s, and its life expectancy
(75.1 years) and obesity rate (41.3 percent) are also similar, almost three
times as many residents (20.8 percent) have at least a bachelor’s degree, and
median household income ($41,504) is almost twice as high.
Wayne County may
not make for the best comparison — in addition to Detroit, it includes the
Grosse Pointes and some other wealthy suburbs that could be pulling its
rankings up. But St. Louis, another struggling city, stands alone as a
jurisdiction for statistical purposes and ranks even higher over all, slightly,
with better education and lower unemployment making up for a median household
income ($34,384) that is lower than Wayne County’s but still quite a bit higher
than Clay County’s $22,296.
At the other end
of the scale, the different variations on our formula consistently yielded the
same result. Six of the top 10 counties in the United States are in the suburbs
of Washington (especially on the Virginia side of the Potomac River), but the
top ranking of all goes to Los Alamos County, home of Los Alamos National
Laboratory, which does much of the scientific work underpinning the U.S.
nuclear arsenal. The lab directly employs one out of every five county
residents and has a budget of $2.1 billion; only a fraction of that is spent
within the county, but that’s still an enormous economic engine for a county of
just 18,000 people.
Here are some
specific comparisons: Only 7.4 percent of Clay County residents have at least a
bachelor’s degree, while 63.2 percent do in Los Alamos. The median household
income in Los Alamos County is $106,426, almost five times what the median Clay
County household earns. In Clay County, 12.7 percent of residents are
unemployed, and 11.7 percent are on disability; the corresponding figures in
Los Alamos County are 3.5 percent and 0.3 percent. Los Alamos County’s obesity
rate is 22.8 percent, while Clay County’s is 45.5 percent. And Los Alamos
County residents live 11 years longer, on average — 82.4 years vs. 71.4 years
in Clay County.
Clay and Los
Alamos Counties are part of the same country. But they are truly different
worlds.
VOCABULARY
- cluster - группа
- jurisdiction - юрисдикция
- overwhelmingly - очень, чрезвычайно
- percentage - процент
- retirement - пенсия, отставка