The article in NYT shared by Imtiaz Bokhari
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/11/upshot/for-the-poor-geography-is-life-and-death.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
Life expectancy of 40-year-olds with household incomes below $28,000,
adjusted for race*
For poor Americans, the place they call home can be a matter of life or death.
The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.
In those differences, documented in sweeping new research, lies an optimistic message: The right mix of steps to improve habits and public health could help people live longer, regardless of how much money they make.
One conclusion from this work, published on Monday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is that the gap in life spans between rich and poor widened from 2001 to 2014. The top 1 percent in income among American men live 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent; for women, the gap is 10 years. These rich Americans have gained three years of longevity just in this century. They live longer almost without regard to where they live. Poor Americans had very little gain as a whole, with big differences among different places.
The Richest American Men Live 15 Years Longer than the Poorest 1 Percent.
Imtiaz Bokhari Sb sent me this article in a personal email making a reference to a talk I gave a month ago on the topic of “Why some nations prosper …. and why some don’t”. In the email he made the point that geography IS a factor in a nation’s prosperity or lack thereof. His memory seems to be that I said in my talk that geography was not at all a factor; I never said geography is not a factor; it IS definitely a factor. But it s one that can be overcome by the more important factors, and I had given examples of countries that had overcome extreme weather conditions to prosper and examples of countries that have used geography as an excuse for their lack of prosperity.
This article is about something different; something more on a micro level but interesting nonetheless. Here geography may mean a block, a town or a city, a county or a state. But you may ask the same questions trying to explain the disparities between those states or counties or even cities that may be located on the same latitude (same geography) but have very different average life spans. What causes those disparities? It can’t be geography in the sense it is commonly used. I think those differences are the same that are at work at the country level.