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 and asks where the outcome differs and how it changes with neighborhood deprivation. It then asks whether the pattern holds when the comparison moves to smaller areas or to individual people, and it 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.
Every statistic in the text is printed from the chapter's data file, not typed by hand. Hover over a number or focus it to see its unit, population, period and source, and its interval where it has one. The file does not check that the sentence around a number names the right population or denominator.
37 of 41 chapters are written: 35 published and 2 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 book as a presentation19 scenes for a talk or a quick tour, each a finding on a chapter figure, stepped with the arrow keys.
- 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
Measuring rich and poor
What the deprivation index that ranks places in most chapters measures, and what a ranking of counties says about the neighborhoods inside them.
Part I
Rankings and scale
How the Area Deprivation Index is built, why home values set most of it, and how a county percentile differs from the percentiles of its tracts.
Volume 2
An American life
Birth and childhood, becoming an adult, work, housing and daily life, then health, aging and death, compared across places ranked by deprivation or income.
Part II
Birth
Birthweight, preterm birth, infant deaths, smoking in pregnancy and the number of births, by county and state.
Part III
School
Test scores, gender gaps, learning growth and school discipline across districts and counties.
Part IV
Becoming an adult
College, teen births, adult income and mental distress for young adults raised in different places.
Part V
Home, work and money
Jobs and wages, home values and redlining, mortgage lending, rent and eviction.
Part VI
Environment, connection and well-being
Air pollution, civic life, loneliness and partnership, and how people rate their lives at different ages.
Part VII
Health and care
Health behaviors, the supply of care, chronic conditions, disability, retirement income and Medicare.
Part VIII
Early death
Where and when people die of homicide, overdose, alcohol and suicide, how long lives last across neighborhoods, and how much of that gap homicide accounts for.
Volume 3
Reading the patterns
How far one ranking of places goes across the outcomes in the book, what groupings of places and model residuals add, and what experiments and other designs find about moving families or changing places.
Part IX
Reading the patterns
The outcomes of the book side by side, neighborhood types, places with better outcomes than a model predicts, change over time, immigration, and the research on moves and policies.
Volume 4
Methods and sources
How the estimates are made: gradients and slopes, groupings of places, and the limits of suppressed death counts.
Part X
How the estimates are made
Estimation methods, groupings of places and the limits of suppressed data.