Hardest Places to Live in US - woe be Eastern KY

[Syt]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/where-are-the-hardest-places-to-live-in-the-us.html?_r=1&abt=0002&abg=1

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, 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 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, 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.

Tie in: What's the Matter With Eastern Kentucky?

[derspiess]

Eastern Kentucky just sucks.  That's all.

[alfred russel]

It seems like the study is measuring the places where people are having trouble living, not necessarily the places that are hardest to live.

[Valmy]

Wyoming is soft living, I wonder why more people do not move there?

[Grey Fox]

Vermont has it pretty easy too.

[Valmy]

Vermont has it pretty easy too.

That one county next to Quebec has it tough though.  Only Wyoming, Hawaii, and Connecticut are soft living in every county.  Clearly those states must have a lot in common.

[KRonn]

Looks like my county in Massachusetts is easy living!   

[Caliga]

Nobody has mocked me yet?  NICE.

[KRonn]

Nobody has mocked me yet?  NICE.

Comparing the map of Ma and Ky, damn, but you moved from easy living in Massachusetts to the tough times of Kentucky!   

[CountDeMoney]

Eastern Kentucky just sucks.  That's all.

..y'all?

[The Brain]

Nobody has mocked me yet?  NICE.

Btw, how is your old Kentucky ho?

[Grey Fox]

Vermont has it pretty easy too.

That one county next to Quebec has it tough though.

Orleans& Essex? That's because no one lives there. Farms & Forest.

[Ed Anger]

Hey, my county is dark blue. If we could only toss Xenia out of the county.... 

[derspiess]

Don't deny your Xenianity.

[Ed Anger]

Don't deny your Xenianity.

We'll keep the Tudor's Biscuit World. But going there for business... BLECH