ZIP Code DestinyReading the patterns16 of 19

Scene 16 of 19, Most differences in life expectancy lie inside counties, not between them. Step 1 of 3, States and counties.

Census tracts, weighted by population

Most differences in life expectancy lie inside counties, not between them

70.3 percent of the variance of tract life expectancy lies between tracts in the same county, 26.7 points of it estimation error, against 34% percent for the ADI

  • Between states
  • Between counties in a state
  • Between tracts in a county
  • Estimation error within counties

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

Most differences in life expectancy lie inside counties, not between them

Scene 16 of 19, step 1 of 3: States and counties. Census tracts, weighted by population.

What to say

The total stays the full width throughout. The noise share comes from the published standard errors; the chapter compares the split with the same split for the deprivation index itself.

About the chart

70.3 percent of the variance of tract life expectancy lies between tracts in the same county, 26.7 points of it estimation error, against 34% percent for the ADI

The life expectancy bar is mostly the two right-hand segments, which together are the share within counties, and the ADI bar is mostly the other two. Each bar sums to the whole variance of its measure; the shares come from every tract in the sample and have no sampling interval.

  • Tract life expectancy is modeled. The mean squared standard error of the tract estimates equals 26.7 percent of the total variance and sits inside the within-county share, as the two right-hand segments show; the 2020-tract standard errors are mapping grade and understate the noise, so the share of the true differences that lies between tracts in a county is lower than the net share.
  • The life expectancy bar uses 78,008 tracts in 3,112 counties and Connecticut planning regions; the ADI bar uses the tracts of the index in the chapter on gradients, slopes and variance. Connecticut's planning regions stand in for its counties.

Source

USALEEP life expectancy, 2010-2015; ACS 2019-2023; Area Deprivation Index, 2023; population-weighted decomposition of the variance, full counts of tracts

Open in Chapter 8.4, Place and the length of a lifeThe chapter’s report, with every estimate and table

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