I wonder what it means to 'live hard'?
[ map = colors means something, if you're not color-blind ]
We chose to rank counties based on six factors:
education,
household income,
unemployment,
disability,
life expectancy,
obesity <-- ***
[ update = more details due to feedback ]
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Anywhere where you do not have the resources to meet the basics.
You'll find that the answer depends a lot on factors such as the color of your skin, and the relative wealth of the family you were born into.
I bet these factors you mention are highly predicted by: education, household income, unemployment, disability, life expectancy, obesity.
And, may be why they chose only these features..
You'll find that the answer depends a lot on factors such as the color of your skin, and the relative wealth of the family you were born into.I bet these factors you mention are highly predicted by: education, household income, unemployment, disability, life expectancy, obesity.
I think you meant "those factors are highly predictive of," unless you're suggesting that the reason a baby is born to a wealthy white family is because she has an advanced graduate degree.
It's perfectly plausible to believe that being black causes poverty.
It's perfectly plausible to believe that being black and being poor share causes.
I'm not willing to accept that being poor causes one to be black.
I think you meant "those factors are highly predictive of," unless you're suggesting that the reason a baby is born to a wealthy white family is because she has an advanced graduate degree.You'll find that the answer depends a lot on factors such as the color of your skin, and the relative wealth of the family you were born into.I bet these factors you mention are highly predicted by: education, household income, unemployment, disability, life expectancy, obesity.
I absolutely see your point. And, my statistics is super rusty.
But, in this study with this data, Race is a Dependent variable andEducation and Household income are Independent variables. So, Race is
being 'predicted' in this case. (For a different data set it certainly
could be the reverse.)
And, there is no "reason"; it can only be Correlation. (unless you are
saying the "reason" why shark attacks increase in the summer time is
because ice cream sales increase in the summer time.)
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You'll find that the answer depends a lot on factors such as the color of your skin, and the relative wealth of the family you were born into.
It's not clear from the county-level data that skin color has much to do with it. (That's the same map that EW posted.) "Not a single major urban county ranks in the bottom 20 percent or so on this scale," despite the large black populations, and there's a huge swath across the TN/KY/WV belt (despite being mostly white) in which life basically sucks.
The dividing line seems to be rural/urban rather than racial. To the extent that poverty is concentrated in rural communities (as it is) it makes sense that there would be a connection between wealth and quality of life. But even there the causal connection is not clear; if you're well enough off, you may decide that what you want to do is move the hell out of your farming community and get a job in a big city.
Similarly, disability and education make sense as underlying factors without regard to race or wealth. Farming is hard physical labor. An injury that I could still work through as an insurance salesman, teacher, or software engineer is likely to disable me as a farmer, and I'm much more likely to get injured working a farm than a file cabinet. Similarly, I'm not going to be able to work as a software engineer without a degree.
Indeed, for many people growing up in rural communities, money or education is the ticket off the farm, which results in strong selection bias -- the people who are left to be surveyed are the ones without money or education.
And, there is no "reason"; it can only be Correlation. (unless you are
saying the "reason" why shark attacks increase in the summer time is
because ice cream sales increase in the summer time.)
That's what I outlined as the second possibility -- shark attacks and ice cream sales share causes.
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You'll find that the answer depends a lot on factors such as the color of your skin, and the relative wealth of the family you were born into.I bet these factors you mention are highly predicted by: education, household income, unemployment, disability, life expectancy, obesity.
I think you meant "those factors are highly predictive of," unless you're suggesting that the reason a baby is born to a wealthy white family is because she has an advanced graduate degree.
It's perfectly plausible to believe that being black causes poverty.
It's perfectly plausible to believe that being black and being poor share causes.
I'm not willing to accept that being poor causes one to be black.
Go live in McDowell County West Virginia, a place I am intimately familiar with.
Poor there has nothing to do with skin color. The white population is just as poor as the black. You'll also find some of the most generous and tightly knit communities in the nation. Working with the Salvation Army as a bell ringer in Kimball, WV, it never ceased to amaze that people I KNEW could barely put food on their own tables donated more than people in much more affluent cities. They were also the only community where people would constantly offer to buy me a hot coffee.
... Poor there has nothing to do with skin color ...
Yes. We have a false premise here, because Orfamay Quest has his statistics backwards.
Nothing to see here; move along. :->
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"Being black causes poverty" doesn't not imply that "All poor people are black".
It's also only a hypothesis, and a plausible one, in the sense that it does not violate any of the laws of physics.
"Being black causes you to be poor" is physically possible. "Being poor causes you to be black" involves time travel, because there's no way that your economic state at age 30 would affect your genes at conception.
I tend to reject causal explanations that require time travel. I'm not alone in this blanket rejection.
Doing it on a county level may obscure the urban poverty effects.
Absolutely. But if you look at the hardship map from the NYT and compare it to a racial map (or this one) and a population density map, it doesn't look (to me) like race is the primary determiner of hardship.
If it were, West Virginia would be a paradise, and the DC metro area would be a wasteland. These are actually the examples singled out in the NYT articles as the extremes.... but in the wrong direction.
I should also point out that the authors of the NYT article considered the "county stats obscure urban effects" hypothesis and rejected it (see para. 8 and 9).
I wonder what it means to 'live hard'?
[ map = colors means something, if you're not color-blind ]
We chose to rank counties based on six factors:
education,
household income,
unemployment,
disability,
life expectancy,
obesity <-- ***[ update = more details due to feedback ]
.
There are some real flaws to this study. First of all education is skewed by where colleges are. Any county with a major University is going to have a high education rating, which has little to do with the people that are from the county.
That is also going to skew the household income, as college professors tend to have good incomes, not to mention the football and basketball coach. The county has 70,000+ households, the University has 7,000+ employees making more than the average household income. Topping out with the Football and Basketball coaches, their incomes don't include the obligatory side jobs (TV and radio shows) that they get paid for. Those 50 people contribute two-thirds of a percent to the average household income, but are only seven-hundredths of a percent of the households.
As for the second "study" most of the first charts counties are in rural and religious areas, places where guns and religion are common. Now is there a correlation between poorness and religion? Because there certainly is between ruralness and guns.
BTW Where is the crime rate? Where is the murder rate? Where is the "recreational" drug statistics? Why doesn't the 7 dead and 29 wounded in Chicago last weekend make it harder to live there? Yes one Chicago newspaper has a WEEKEND SHOOTING TRACKER!
But that's exactly the point. Look closer at DC and you'll find the black population is damn poor, but the other areas are very well off.
If it were, West Virginia would be a paradise, and the DC metro area would be a wasteland. These are actually the examples singled out in the NYT articles as the extremes.... but in the wrong direction.I should also point out that the authors of the NYT article considered the "county stats obscure urban effects" hypothesis and rejected it (see para. 8 and 9).
Don't confuse DC with "the DC metro area." We're talking about the DC suburbs here, which is both plurality-black (according to the racial maps) and a very nice place to live.
There are some real flaws to this study. First of all education is skewed by where colleges are. Any county with a major University is going to have a high education rating, which has little to do with the people that are from the county.
That is also going to skew the household income, as college professors tend to have good incomes, not to mention the football and basketball coach. The county has 70,000+ households, the University has 7,000+ employees making more than the average household income. Topping out with the Football and Basketball coaches, their incomes don't include the obligatory side jobs (TV and radio shows) that they get paid for. Those 50 people contribute two-thirds of a percent to the average household income, but are only seven-hundredths of a percent of the households.
As for the second "study" most of the first charts counties are in rural and religious areas, places where guns and religion are common. Now is there a correlation between poorness and religion? Because there certainly is between ruralness and guns.
No, no, and no. First of all, having a university will actually skew the education level down, precisely because of all the students (who, almost by definition, do not have a bachelors degree, which is this study's threshhold). Typically about a quarter of the adult population have bachelors' degrees. In a pure college town with a 15:1 student:faculty, only one sixteenth of the population (the faculty) is so equipped. What can boost the education numbers is if a lot of the students hang around after college graduation, but this in turn implies that it's not just a college in the middle of an otherwise rural community, because there needs to be some sort of high-end economy to employ all the graduates.
Similarly, university student households have a very low income because the students don't work full-time and the jobs they have are low-paying. (Champaign, IL, home of UIUC, for example, has a per capita income $5000 lower than the rest of the state and a median household income $15,000 lower.) And median household income is specifically not that sensitive to outliers, which is why the authors of the study used median and not mean income.
BTW Where is the crime rate? Where is the murder rate? Where is the "recreational" drug statistics? Why doesn't the 7 dead and 29 wounded in Chicago last weekend make it harder to live there? Yes one Chicago newspaper has a WEEKEND SHOOTING TRACKER!
Buried in life expectancy and disability numbers -- if murder is actually a relatively common event, life expectancy goes down substantially. If you're permanently injured but not killed, that raises the disability numbers. But, again, I don't think you understand the scale of the numbers you're dealing with -- seven deaths in a city of 2.7 million people (the most recent numbers for Chicago population) are about 2 and a half deaths per million people. I'll let you do the math. If Clay County, KY had one murder per decade and if Chicago had seven murders per week, which community would have a higher murder rate?
And, in fact, the violent crime rate in Clay County is above the national average. This includes at least one murder murder between 2004-2008 and another in 2009, in 2011, in 2012, in 2013, another in 2013, and in 2014.
So, basically, you are probably underestimating the rural crime rate.
There are some real flaws to this study. First of all education is skewed by where colleges are. Any county with a major University is going to have a high education rating, which has little to do with the people that are from the county.
That is also going to skew the household income, as college professors tend to have good incomes, not to mention the football and basketball coach. The county has 70,000+ households, the University has 7,000+ employees making more than the average household income. Topping out with the Football and Basketball coaches, their incomes don't include the obligatory side jobs (TV and radio shows) that they get paid for. Those 50 people contribute two-thirds of a percent to the average household income, but are only seven-hundredths of a percent of the households.
As for the second "study" most of the first charts counties are in rural and religious areas, places where guns and religion are common. Now is there a correlation between poorness and religion? Because there certainly is between ruralness and guns.
No, no, and no. First of all, having a university will actually skew the education level down, precisely because of all the students (who, almost by definition, do not have a bachelors degree, which is this study's threshhold). Typically about a quarter of the adult population have bachelors' degrees. In a pure college town with a 15:1 student:faculty, only one sixteenth of the population (the faculty) is so equipped. What can boost the education numbers is if a lot of the students hang around after college graduation, but this in turn implies that it's not just a college in the middle of an otherwise rural community, because there needs to be some sort of high-end economy to employ all the graduates.
Similarly, university student households have a very low income because the students don't work full-time and the jobs they have are low-paying. (Champaign, IL, home of UIUC, for example, has a per capita income...
Funny you should mention Champaign, because that is what I was basing my statistics off of. And while you say it is lower than the state average, that doesn't matter, because we are looking at COUNTY averages and Champaign, the city, has about $4000 more per household than the County average. It also has not quite half the county population and housing units. If you eliminate Champaign from the County statistics, the income drops an additional $3000 per household.
You might want to check on the percentage of College educated too. Champaign County has, according to the OP's link, at 42.2% which is one of the highest in the state, compared to most of the pure rural counties which have numbers 20% or below, Mclean County has comparable numbers but it is the home of Illinois State and Illinois Wesleyan.
In 2013 there were 415 murders, lowest since 1965. Since that Chicago has about 130 times the population of Clay Co KY, that would be about 3 murders per year in Clay Co.
Between 2004 and 2008 there were 749 total crimes reported in Clay County, Kentucky (42 of them violent). Of the 150 crimes that take place per year in Clay County, close to 50% transpire less than one mile from home. On average, someone is a victim of a crime in Clay County, Kentucky 150 times a year. This includes 1 murder, 1 rape, and at least five hundred thefts (including 112 car thefts).
So in five years there was 1 murder in Clay Co. In the same time period there were 2300 murders in the city of Chicago. That means in that 5 year period there was 1 murder per 23000 (or so) Clay Countians, and 1 murder per 1200 Chicagoans! That is almost 20 times the murder rate. Over 8000 rapes in Chicago to the one in Clay Co. 70 times the rape rate! Roughly 179000 violent crimes in Chicago compared to 42 in Clay Co. or 1 per 15 in Chicago compared to 1 in 550 in Clay Co.
So honestly which place is safer?