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Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?
The Upshot, a New York Times data analysis venture looked at six basic measures to get a picture of the quality and longevity of life in each county of the nation, including educational attainment, household income, jobless rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity rate.
See a detailed interactive map of the results here.
The study identified Eastern Kentucky, “land of storybook hills and drawls,” as the most difficult place to live.
Annie Lowrey wrote in The New York Times magazine:
Clay County, in dead last, might as well be in a different country. The median household income there is barely above the poverty line, at $22,296, and is just over half the nationwide median. Only 7.4 percent of the population has a bachelor’s degree or higher. The unemployment rate is 12.7 percent. The disability rate is nearly as high, at 11.7 percent. (Nationwide, that figure is 1.3 percent.) Life expectancy is six years shorter than average. Perhaps related, nearly half of Clay County is obese.
It’s coal country, but perhaps in name only. In the first quarter of this year, just 54 people were employed in coal mining in Clay County, a precipitous drop from its coal-production peak in 1980. That year, about 2.5 million tons of coal were taken out of the ground in Clay; this year, the county has produced a fraction of that — just over 38,000 tons. Former mines have been reclaimed, and that land has been repurposed in scattershot ways: a golf course, shopping centers, a medium-security federal prison. But nothing has truly come to replace the industry on which Clay County once depended.
Alan Flippen of The Upshot discussed some of the lower ends of the findings:
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.
Of the counties that fared better, he said:
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, N.M., 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.
Read Lowrey’s report here and see the data summary here.
—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
Related Entries
- June 25, 2014 Of Baby Eagles and Human Prospects
- June 24, 2014 Do You Know How Many People Are Poor in Today’s World? Neither Does the U.N.
Source: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/where_are_the_hardest_places_to_live_in_the_us_20140627/
Obviously where the most Africans and Latinos are.
Wow, let’s condense this to actually make sense:
“A New York Times Data Analysis Venture…determined six factors that they considered ‘made a location a place which is hard to live in’, and rated the nation based on these factors.” The factors are:
educational attainment
household income
jobless rate
disability rate
life expectancy
obesity rate
Now, I ask the common person, other than ‘the jobless rate’ and ‘household income’, how does the other FOUR FACTORS have any affect on making a place ‘hard to live’?
Let’s reword the whole article and it’s title to “where are the most conservative locations that require you to work to make a living.” Now, it all makes sense.
Seriously, the criteria of those six factors leads to ‘how cushy of an entitlement Socialist nirvana can you create’, and those who placed in the blue areas are either near-desolate (no population), or are entrenched Socialist Liberal-Progressive Democrat strongholds.
Look again, and realize a Republican-Democrat map, when you see it. (again, allowing for the camouflage of ‘low density areas’ to hide the map for what it really is).