Where are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.? Note for a Lecture, " Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Alan Flippen, New York Times; via MP on Facebook

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.)

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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 working­age 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, W.Va.

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 well­being.

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.

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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.

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.