In the United States, geography affects everything from economic mobility to lifespan.
In a paper published earlier this year, the economist Raj Chetty and a number of co-authors explored the life expectancies of the rich and poor. They found not only a staggering rich-poor life expectancy gap, but also that the life expectancies of the poor vary greatly depending on location, with low-income people in certain cities living approximately five years longer than those in other cities.
The researchers determined that living in a wealthy city with a well-educated population, a higher proportion of immigrants, and larger government expenditures produced the longest life expectancies for low-income people. In other words, the local social safety net matters.
Unfortunately, the robustness of the safety net is increasingly dependent on geography, as a new discussion paper from the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty makes clear. Thanks to our country’s fascination with federalism, and especially the welfare reforms of 1996, the majority of safety-net programs for the poor today are administered, and at least partially financed, by state governments. Even programs that are entirely funded by the federal government (and therefore theoretically less vulnerable to the budgetary shortfalls or whims of state government) are often administered at the state level, and are thus dependent on a robust outreach and enrollment effort by state and local governments. And not every state prioritizes outreach and enrollment, a reality that results in stark inequalities across states in the access to the social safety net that’s provided to low-income folks. As Institute for Research on Poverty researchers Sarah Bruch,Marcia K. Meyers, and Janet Gornick point out, “the saying ‘pick your parents well’ can now be expanded to ‘and hope they live in a state with a robust safety net.”
[For more of this story, written by Dwyer Gunn, go to https://psmag.com/how-geograph...4d84beac1#.d7b7mp9ow]
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