Environment, connection and well-being

This part turns to the air people breathe and to what they do and report, and it keeps apart measures that are easily run together. Environmental indicators estimate pollution for census tracts and do not measure what anyone breathes. Participation is what residents of a county do in civic life, such as voting. Partnership is whether a person is married or lives with a partner. Life evaluation is how a person rates a life on a ladder from the worst possible to the best possible, and daily feelings are how the previous day went. Each comes from its own source and unit. The chapters use tracts, counties, ZIP Code Tabulation Areas and individual survey respondents, and a pattern in one unit is not treated as a finding about another.

Chapter 6.1, Air pollution finds that the sign of the link between traffic pollution and deprivation depends on the comparison. The correlation is negative across tracts nationally and positive within counties. The percentiles for nitrogen dioxide, diesel particulate matter and traffic rise with the Hispanic share and with the Black share of a tract, both across tracts and within counties.

Chapter 6.2, Civic life, loneliness and partnership finds that voter turnout and census self-response fall with county deprivation, and that neither keeps a link to upward mobility once county income, racial composition and poverty are held fixed. Gallup respondents who are married or in a domestic partnership rate their lives higher than other adults, and the difference is no smaller in counties with more social capital. Selection into partnership is the main limit on that comparison. Modeled loneliness is lower in ZIP Code Tabulation Areas where more residents are married, but the model behind it already uses age, so part of that pattern is built in.

Chapter 6.3, Life evaluation and daily feelings separates the ladder from the day. Respondents in the most deprived tenth of counties rate their lives lower than those in the least deprived tenth. At the same nominal household income the order reverses, and allowing for county rent levels removes that difference, so the data cannot separate a place difference from a price difference. Physical pain is more common in the most deprived counties under each of these comparisons, and of the daily feelings it is the one that tracks county deaths of despair. The Gallup interviews are unweighted, and no respondent is followed over time.

Chapter 6.4, Well-being across the life span asks how people rate their lives and describe their days at different ages, and whether the pattern differs between richer and poorer places. In Gallup interviews from 2009 to 2017 the ladder dips in midlife, the depth of that dip differs with household income, and daily feelings follow other schedules. The interviews compare people of different ages at about the same time, so age and birth cohort are mixed together, and the oldest respondents are survivors of their cohort. The chapter does not follow any person through a life.