Where you live in America can have a major effect on how young you die.
On paper, Lexington County, S.C., and Placer County, Calif., have a lot in common. They’re both big, wealthy, suburban counties with white supermajorities that border on their respective state’s capital cities. They both were at the vanguard of their states’ 20th century Republican advances — Lexington in the 1960s when it pivoted from the racist Dixiecrats; Placer with the Reagan Revolution in 1980 — and twice voted for Donald Trump by wide margins. But when it comes to how long their residents can count on living, the parallels fall apart. Placer has a Scandinavia-like life expectancy of 82.3 years. In Lexington, the figure is 77.7, a little worse than China’s.
Or take Maine’s far-flung Washington County, the poorest in New England where the per capita income is $27,437. The county is a hardscrabble swath of blueberry fields, forestland and fishing ports that was ravaged by the opioid epidemic and is almost completely white. It has one of the worst life expectancies in the […]
Thank you for an excellent analysis.
I would add that there is a very large disparity in educational levels in the US, including a serious lack of understanding of the scientific method and of statistical analyses. Unfortunately, I am afraid that many Americans would dismiss this article as a biased report from a leftist think-tank or simply partisan politics. I do not know how the regional disparities in educational levels would factor into this analysis, but as long as the US does such a poor job in public and parochial education, we will continue to have election outcomes and policy development based on gut reactions, “group think” exacerbated by the internet in general and social media in particular, misinformation, cultural bias, and tradition rather than scientifically based public policy.
So I read the article and it was facilitating in that it divided up the country in ways I had not thought about, and it provided a strong analysis and justification regarding the data. My final reaction, however, was “Meh”.
As the article states at the very end: “So how to improve the situation? Lloyd-Jones, the preventive medicine expert at Northwestern University, says it’s all about the policy environment people live in.
“If you just want to move the needle on longevity in the short term, aggressive tobacco control and taxation policies are about the quickest way you can do that,” he says. “But for the long term we really have to launch our children into healthier trajectories by giving them great educational and socioeconomic opportunities and access to clean air and water and healthy foods.”
So do people have a right or not to choose their representatives or not? If so, then they are getting the outcomes associated with the representatives they have chosen. This should not be a suprise. Not everyone wants “aggressive tobacco control and taxation policies”. Will you respect the will of the voters or not?