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.
Richard Florida
I think you either have a typo or you switched W VA and VA in your data. According to the graphics, the smoking rate in West VA is 16% not 26.6
sparky, yes, you're right. I did wonder if the switch might be due to the statistics graphed against smoking rates being from years prior to '98, but none of the other states appear to have shifted. In Virginia, where I live, tobacco is popular for cultural reasons, unfortunately.
West Virginia has a darker color than Virginia on all the maps at the top of the article, but Virginia appears to have the highest smoking rate in the country on the graphs. Something does seem to be wrong there.
You are absolutely right and thank you for pointing this out. There was a mistake in the merge of this data, and an update is on its way (with new scatters and correlations). The basic relations still hold but become even stronger with this correction. Once more, thank you for noticing!
I attended law school at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) from 1989-1992. A large percentage of my classmates were from the state, and an even larger percentage from the mid-Atlantic states and central southern states in general. It's a high-smoking region, as you note, including for cultural reasons as a reader mentioned.
I was memorably surprised at the following exchange, which, in light of Richard's statistics, seems less remarkable and in fact explainable as education-related negative correlation:
In one large lecture class of 80- to 100 students in the fall of 1989, the professor wanted to make some point involving random subsets, and casually asked every smoker in the room to raise their hand. NO ONE did. Not a single hand went up. The professor stopped in his tracks, said, "C'mon, I'm not your mother, I'm not going to tell the Dean, I need a subgroup - who here smokes?" Answer: in that room, no one. We all started chatting, not afraid of speaking up, and wanting to help out. Everyone was puzzled that no one else smoked. In the end, one side of the room agreed to be "smokers" for that exercise. From what I knew of my friends and classmates, that was in general true -- the rate of smoking among law students at Chapel Hill 20 years ago was very, very low. So much for Tobacco Road (but still, Go, 'Heels!)
I should also note that it was not necessarily the case that everyone there came from a family background where the level of formal education was high. But by definition, everyone in that class had a college degree themselves. Interestingly, our grandparents' generation was among the first where smoking (and drinking -- Prohibition) became more common among women and among the more formally educated in general, trends that intensified in our parents' generation. By now, I have lost my grandmother, a beloved teacher, two very dear mentors, and the mother of one of my closest friends, all smokers and all dead of emphysema or lung cancer. My mother has lung cancer now as well, almost certainly due to lifetime exposure to my grandmother's heavy smoking (mom never smoked, herself.) Quite a toll, and par for the course among that age group.