Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in America. More than 72 million American adults are
obese, according to estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics. But
obesity varies greatly by state. The map below, from the Centers from Disease Control (CDC), shows the obesity rate for the 50 states, measured as the share of people with a Body Mass Index (BMI) over 30 which the CDC classifies as "obese."
A week or so ago, I looked at the relationship between smoking and a variety of economic, social, and health factors. With a helpful analytical hand from Charlotta Mellander, we found that smoking was significantly correlated with obesity as well as being correlated with education levels, class structure, and other factors. So, we decided to take a quick look at the state-level factors that might be associated with obesity. We ran some simple correlations and scatter-plots between state obesity rates and these factors. As usual, we point out that correlation does not imply causality, but simply points to associations between variables. Still, a number of interesting things stand out.
It should come as little surprise that states with higher levels of obesity have significantly higher rates of death from cancer, heart disease, and cerebrovascular diseases like hypertension. There is a significant correlation between obesity and death rates from cancer (.7), heart disease (.7), and cerebrovascular disease (.7).
It might be, however, that states with greater percentages of obesity are those where people pay less attention to their health generally or are more likely to engage in risky behavior. And that's what we find at least in the case of smoking which correlates highly with state levels of obesity (.8).
Might obesity be related to states' broader social and psychological climates? To get at this, we looked at the relationship between obesity and a commonly used measure of subjective well-being or happiness developed by the Gallup Organization. Obesity is negatively associated with state happiness (with a correlation of -.6). Since these correlations only reflect associations between variables and not causality, it's hard to say whether this reflects the fact that happier people eat less, are healthier, or are less prone to obesity, or if unhappier people eat more, are unhealthier, or are somehow more prone to obesity, or if both obesity and happiness levels reflect something else. To get at this, we look at the associations between state obesity rates and social and demographic factors below.
Common sense would suggest that more affluent people would have lower levels of obesity and poorer ones higher, and we find such an association. Obesity is correlated with income levels (-.6) and more moderately so with economic output, measured as gross state product per capita (-.4).
One would think that states with greater concentrations of more highly educated people have lower levels of obesity, and that is what we find. States with higher levels of human capital, measured as the percentage of adults with a college degree, have lower levels of obesity (the correlation being -.8).
To what extent does obesity reflect the kind of work people do? We examine the relationships between obesity and three classes of jobs - creative/professional/knowledge jobs, blue-collar working class jobs, and standardized service class jobs like those in food processing and home health care. Obesity is strongly associated with the share of working class jobs (with a correlation of .7). Obesity is negatively correlated with the share of creative class jobs (-.6). Obesity is also negatively correlated with the share of service class jobs (-.4), though more moderately so.
Obesity is lower in states with higher concentrations of artists, musicians, and entertainers (with a correlation of-.6), those with larger concentrations of gays and lesbians (-.5), and immigrants (-.5). This likely reflects broader structural characteristics of those states, as more highly educated states also tend to be more tolerant and open to diversity.
Even as the economy improves, the unemployment rate continues to grow higher and job creation remains a central issue. Not only does unemployment vary widely across cities and regions, certain places have been able to generate many more new jobs than others.
A couple days ago, I posted a chart which compares the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings for America's 50 largest metro areas. It's a pretty good metric of the resilience of job markets in the face of our ongoing employment crisis. The most resilient metros on this score, Greater D.C. and Baltimore, generate about one new job opening for every unemployed person. The least resilient have much higher numbers of unemployed workers for every new opening. In Detroit, the ratio is 18 unemployed workers for each job opening, in Miami its 12 to 1, Las Vegas 8 to 1.
The question becomes: Does this just reflect random, idiosyncratic differences among metros, or might there be more systematic, identifiable factors that distinguish places with more resilient job markets from less resilient ones? To get a handle on this, Charlotta Mellander and I looked at whether and what regional economic factors might affect the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings. (As usual, I point out that our analysis identifies correlation or association between variables and does not in any way imply causality.)
The nature of the job market itself appears to play the most important role. The most highly correlated factor of all was the share of creative class employment (.6). There were also relatively strong correlations for three specific kinds of creative class jobs: science and engineering (.57), legal occupations (.53), and management (.5). We find more moderate correlations for arts, entertainment, and media jobs (.44), computer science and mathematics occupations (.44), and business and finance jobs (.42). Places with more resilient job markets also had higher levels of human capital (.46), measured as the percentage of adults with a bachelor's degree and above. There was no statistically significant association between resilient job markets and health care, education, and architecture and engineering jobs. This is troubling since many believe "meds and eds" jobs to be among the most stable of all as well as being a major source of future employment growth. Job markets in places with higher shares of working class employment were more problematic, the correlation for this variable being negative and significant (.-46).
Not surprisingly, more resilient job markets were also associated with stronger, more higher-paying regional economies. Better ratios of unemployed workers to job openings were associated with higher regional income levels (.58), higher regional wages (.48), and greater regional economic output per person (.45).
One in five Americans continue to smoke cigarettes, according to a new survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The smoking rate varies from low of 9.2 percent in Utah to a high of 26.6 percent in West Virginia. The map below, from the Wall Street Journal, shows the smoking rate by state.
The data are interesting and they allow us to look at the extent to which smoking is associated with all sorts of things, from more obvious ones like cancer and heart disease to the economic and demographic characteristics of states with higher or lower levels of smoking and even the relationship between smoking and happiness. With a helpful analytical assist from my colleague Charlotta Mellander, we decided to take a quick look. We ran some simple correlations and scatter-plots between state smoking rates and these factors. As usual, we point out that correlation does not imply causality, but simply points to associations between variables. Still, a number of interesting things stand out.
It will come as little surprise that states with higher levels of smoking have significantly higher rates of death from cancer, heart disease, and cerebrovascular diseases like hypertension. There is a significant correlation between state smoking rates and death rates from cancer (.75), heart disease (.7), and cerebrovascular disease (.6).
It
might be, however, that states with greater percentages of smokers are
those where people pay less attention to their health generally or are
more likely to engage in risky behavior. Consider the relationship
between state smoking rates and their levels of obesity, where we find
significant association both for obesity among adults (.7) and
children (.6).
Might
smoking be related to states' broader social and psychological
climates? To get at this, we looked at the relationship between smoking
and a commonly used measure of subjective well-being or happiness
developed by the Gallup Organization. Smoking is negatively associated
with state happiness (with a correlation of -.7). Since these
correlations only reflect associations between variables and not
causality, it's hard to say whether this reflects the fact that happier
people smoke less or unhappier ones smoke more, or that both smoking
and happiness levels reflect something else. To get at this, we look at
the associations between state smoking levels and social and
demographic factors below.
Common sense would suggest that more affluent people would smoke less and poorer ones would smoke more, but that's not what the data indicate - at least when comparing states. State smoking levels are not related to state income levels or to Gross State Product per capita; the correlations for both are not statistically significant.
One would think that more highly educated people smoke less. And that is borne out by our analysis. Smoking is highly associated with education levels, measured as the percentage of adults with a college degree (with a negative correlation of -.8).
To what extent does smoking reflect the kind of work people do? We examine the relationships between smoking levels and three classes of jobs - creative/professional/ knowledge jobs, blue-collar working class jobs, and standardized service class jobs like those in food processing and home health care. The strongest association is with working class jobs, with a correlation of .5: Smoking is higher in states with a greater concentration of these blue-collar jobs. Smoking is also associated with service class jobs. But here the correlation is negative (-.6). Smoking does not appear to be associated with knowledge-professional-creative jobs, the correlation here is not statistically significant.
That said, smoking rate is associated with concentrations of artists, musicians, and entertainers. Contrary to the stereotypical image of cigarette-puffing bohemians or hipsters, smoking is less prevalent in states with more of these artistic types: The correlation is negative (-.5).
Lastly, smoking is negatively correlated with larger concentrations of gays and lesbians, as well as immigrants (both with correlations of roughly -.45). This likely reflects broader structural characteristics of those states, as more highly educated states also tend to be more tolerant and open to diversity.
The big winners: D.C. and Baltimore. NY and Boston also do well, along with Silicon Valley and San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, and Denver. Salt Lake City and Oklahoma City are also in very good shape, as well as, surprisingly, certain Rustbelt Cleveland and Milwaukee.
Chart from 
The table below shows the 10 highest-scoring and the 10 lowest-scoring congressional districts on the Well-Being Index. The table speaks for itself. The happiest districts are among the most affluent in the nation. Six of the top 10 are affluent and physically magnificent California communities. The least happy districts are mainly places of extreme disadvantage, inner-city neighborhoods in Detroit, Cleveland, South Philly, the Bronx, or Appalachia. There are a couple of slight anomalies - wealthy Grosse Point, Michigan, is lumped together with poor inner-city Detroit neighborhoods (wonder why that would be?), and given the devastation of greater Detroit it's not surprising that even the rich would be less happy then elsewhere. And hipster Williamsburg is lumped together with Bed-Stuy: But, then again, whoever said hipsters were happy...
Paul Kennedy famously argued that imperial overstretch -- that is, devoting too much money and resources to military uses -- plays a central role in the decline of great powers, including the United States. But it looks like America's growing obesity epidemic is reducing the pool of capable recruits, according to this story in The Washington Post (via Dana Goldstein). About 75 percent of the country's 17- to 24-year-olds are ineligible for military service, largely because they are poorly educated, overweight and have physical ailments that make them unfit for the armed forces, according to a report to be issued Thursday.
Other factors, such as drug use, criminal records and mental problems, contribute to what military leaders say is a major problem that threatens the country's ability to defend itself at a time when the all-volunteer force is already strained fighting two wars.
Money quote:
Childhood obesity varies considerably across the 50 states and reflects some straightforward economic and demographic patterns, according to a basic correlation analysis by my colleague Charlotta Mellander. Childhood obesity, not surprisingly, reflects adult obesity (with a correlation of .54). It is also more prevalent in states with large working-class populations (.4). It is less likely in states with higher income levels (-.32), greater concentrations of the creative class (-.37), and especially those with higher levels of adults with college degrees (-.64).When you get kids who can't do push-ups, pull-ups or run, this is a fundamental problem not just for the military but for the country," said Curtis Gilroy, the Pentagon's director of accessions policy. Many kids are not "taking physical education in school; they're more interested in sedentary activities such as the computer or television. And we have a fast-food mentality in this country."
Photo Credit: Flickr User Seattle Municipal Archives
The first map below shows the percentages of people in various regions of the world that desire to permanently move to another country.
The second map shows the places these movers would most like to relocate to.
Gallup also compiled a very interesting index of potential net migration which compares "the estimated number of adults who would like to move out of a
country permanently subtracted from the estimated number who would like
to move to it," as a proportion of the total population. Here are the top five and bottom five countries. Interestingly, the United States did not make the top five.
Today, we take it for granted the streets are there to move cars,
and also to carry buses as well as cyclists, pedestrians, and the
occasional skater, scooter-rider, and Segway user. The typical solution
is to keep pedestrians on the sidewalk and paint lanes on the street to
separate cars from cyclists or create express lanes for buses.But maybe there's another approach: Why not consider devoting different streets to different kinds of transportation? And surely cities need more green space and some are actually getting it. Inspired by the High-Line Park, by DC's Rock Creek Park, and Toronto's extensive ravine system, I have been noodling about the possibility of creating linear green belts or what I like to think of as sliver parks through cities. I literally feel this when I walk through Toronto's ravines, or in the past when I cycled through D.C.'s Rock Creek Park. It provides a natural environment in the city and creates green zones for cycling, walking, picnicking, or other activities. But I thought this is far too pie-in-the-sky to actually be implemented or even proposed.
So I was more than pleasantly surprised to see The New York Times' Nicolai Ouroussoff highlighting just such an approach coming out of a nine-month design competition for the Bronx's "faded" Grand Concourse.
A proposal by the New York office of the international design firm EDAW that would create a strip of communal farmland down the middle of the Concourse verges on cliché. But it improves when you keep in mind the grittiness of some of the urban gardens in New York or Berlin and imagine them stretched out along several miles. A new light-rail line would run the length of the boulevard; traffic would be reduced to two lanes in each direction, down from the current six.
A raucous proposal by the French team Nadau Lavergne Architects would pile more activities on top of existing structures to add density to the neighborhood and create unexpected urban frictions. Schools and cultural institutions would be stacked over apartment complexes, freeing up the street level for commercial use. A graffiti-covered streetcar would run up and down the Concourse, linking it to Manhattan. The Concourse would be packed with trees, transforming it into a linear urban forest.
Part of what is moving about these proposals is that their approaches have become so familiar. Not long ago the notion of building farmland in the middle of a busy urban roadway would have seemed like madness; today it seems too obvious. So does the idea that segregating urban functions can drain the life from a city.
Check out the terrific images from the project website, including this slide show. A full gallery of all the submitted projects is here.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Richard Florida
