ZIP Code DestinyAdult life12 of 19

Scene 12 of 19, Smoking falls as income rises, while binge drinking climbs. Step 1 of 2, Three that fall.

Adults answering the BRFSS, weighted, by household income band

Smoking falls as income rises, while binge drinking climbs

Binge drinking rose from 13.3% to 20.4% of adults across the five income bands while smoking, obesity and inactivity fell

Scenes

Where the comparison starts

  1. Life expectancy falls with each step toward more deprived neighborhoods
  2. Inside each New York borough, neighborhoods differ widely in life expectancy
  3. Home values set most of the deprivation ranking

Growing up

  1. Babies in more deprived counties are more often born small or early
  2. Test scores rise with county income, and gaps between groups remain inside districts
  3. Black and white children raised in the same neighborhood reach different adult incomes
  4. Former students of for-profit colleges earn the least a decade after entry

Adult life

  1. Where local jobs are scarce, residents hold better-paid jobs than the county offers
  2. Whether rent burden rises with deprivation depends on the comparison
  3. More deprived places have less traffic pollution nationally, but more within their own county
  4. Young adults report more distress than a decade ago, and the top income bracket the least at every age
  5. Smoking falls as income rises, while binge drinking climbs
  6. People rate their lives lowest in midlife, while stress declines with age

Reading the patterns

  1. The most deprived places usually stand farther from the national value than the least deprived
  2. Neighborhoods a few kilometers apart can differ by years of life expectancy
  3. Most differences in life expectancy lie inside counties, not between them
  4. Neighborhood types line up on outcomes but blur into one another
  5. Mobility beyond what census measures predict clusters by region
  6. These comparisons describe places, not what moving would do

Read the bookExplore the figuresMethods

Smoking falls as income rises, while binge drinking climbs

Scene 12 of 19, step 1 of 2: Three that fall. Adults answering the BRFSS, weighted, by household income band.

What to say

The survey reports five discrete income bands; nothing between them is observed. The chapter also has an eight-band view for the most recent years.

About the chart

Binge drinking rose from 13.3% to 20.4% of adults across the five income bands while smoking, obesity and inactivity fell

Binge drinking is the one line that rises from the lowest band to the highest, and the other three lines fall at every step. Each line plots the weighted share of adults with the behavior in each band; the bands around the lines are 95% confidence intervals, narrow because every cell holds hundreds of thousands of respondents. The rise is an average: the race and ethnicity tab of the within-groups figure shows where it is absent. The second view splits the highest band into four for 2021 to 2024, the years in which BRFSS recorded those categories.

  • Respondents who did not know their household income or declined to give it are left out of the bands, 19.4% of adults. The five bands group the income categories that BRFSS used in every year. The categories are in nominal dollars, so the highest band holds 30.2% of respondents who gave an income in 2014 and 46.1% in 2024, and part of that shift is a step at the 2021 change in the income question.
  • Intervals are 95% confidence intervals from the survey's stratum and primary sampling unit (design-based, Taylor linearization). No cell rests on fewer than 30 respondents. The survey is a repeated cross-section of adults in the states and the District of Columbia; Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are not included.
  • Every measure is self-reported by telephone. Estimates describe the people who answered, and BRFSS geography stops at the state, so they say nothing about tracts.

Source

BRFSS 2014-2024 public-use files (binge drinking from 2015), weighted (BRFSS final weight) with design-based intervals

Open in Chapter 7.2, Health behaviors, person by personThe chapter’s report, with every estimate and table

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