ZIP Code Destiny
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What the book is, the ways in and the volumes.
ZIP Code Destiny compares outcomes across American places from birth to old age. Each chapter takes one question, asks where the outcome differs, how it changes with neighborhood deprivation and whether the pattern holds when the comparison moves to smaller areas or to individual people, and ends with what its data cannot show. The chapters use different populations, periods and sources, so the life course sets the order of the book and no chapter follows one person through it. Most chapters count census tracts, counties, school districts or survey respondents, not ZIP codes; the title uses the ZIP code as shorthand for an address. Studies with a stated research design, such as a lottery or a policy change, are reported in labeled boxes, apart from the book's descriptive comparisons.
35 of 39 chapters are written: 35 published and 0 drafts still being checked. The other 4 are planned: each shows the question it will ask and the data it will use, and states no result.
Ways in
- Read in orderBegin with the introduction, Place across an American life, and follow the book part by part.
- The argument in eight chapters8 chapters that give the main line of the argument.
- Differences inside one county4 chapters on differences inside a single county.
- Methods first5 chapters that start with how the numbers are made.
All chapters lists every chapter with its finding and status. Explorers are interactive tools that sit beside the parts. All 3 are planned. Reference holds the data sources, glossary, figure gallery and methods.
The reading guide sets out the four kinds of claims, the patterns that recur, how to read a figure and what grain means. Read it before the first chapter for the rules the chapters follow, or come back to it when a figure or a term is unclear.
A figure from the book
Figure 1
Life expectancy is lower in each higher tenth of tracts by deprivation, and smoking rises with it while the annual checkup rises little
Tract life expectancy at birth by Area Deprivation Index percentile, and two modeled health measures by tenth of tracts
Life expectancy at birth falls from 82.3 years in the least deprived tenth of tracts to 74.0 years in the most deprived
Life expectancy at birth against the Area Deprivation Index national percentile, one dot per sampled tract, with the population-weighted mean and the interquartile range of tracts at each percentile, deaths in 2010 to 2015
Loading data
The cloud and the line slope down from the least deprived tracts on the left to the most deprived on the right; the line is lower in each tenth than in the one before, and between neighboring percentiles it sometimes rises by a fraction of a year. The line is the population-weighted mean of tract life expectancy at each ADI percentile, the band is the interquartile range of tracts at that percentile, which is spread and not an interval, and the markers are tenths of tracts with 95% intervals from a bootstrap over counties.
The four volumes
Volume 1
Cradle and climb
Birth, school and the start of adult life, from the first year to about age 25.
Volume 2
The grind
The working years: home and money, health, early death and social connection.
Part IV
Home and money
Home values, income, redlining and mortgage lending.
Part V
Health and the body
Health behaviors, chronic conditions, air quality and the supply of care.
Part VI
Early death
How long lives last across neighborhoods, and deaths before old age from violence, overdose, alcohol and suicide.
Part VII
Connection and well-being
Civic life, loneliness, partnership and how people rate their lives.
Volume 3
The ledger
Old age, the neighborhood types that span the whole map, and the places that do better than their circumstances predict.
Part VIII
Old age
Disability, retirement income, Medicare and well-being in later life.
Part IX
The whole map
Neighborhood types, change over time, immigration and the places that do better than predicted.
Volume 4
The factory
How the estimates are made: gradients and slopes, the deprivation index, and the limits of suppressed death counts.
Part X
How the estimates are made
Estimation methods, the deprivation index and the limits of suppressed data.