The importance of place, race and wealth

Organized people getting results 

Heine Brothers employees unionized, negotiated with the company and recently reached a four-year contract that guarantees at least $15 per hour for most employees. 

The recent legislative session here in Kentucky was full of terrible policies. But the other nine months of this year won’t be as bad, because a coalition of Democrats, moderate Republicans and independents, led by teachers, got Andy Beshear elected four years ago. 

Chicago just elected an impressive teacher-turned-politician as mayor. Brandon Johnson’s victory was helped by a multi-racial coalition led by the Chicago Teachers Union. 

The importance of place 

These are the top five states for life expectancy at birth, according to data from the Robert Wood Foundation. (This data is from 2018. I assume that the numbers have shifted a bit but not the general order of states.) 

Hawaii (82 years) 

California (81) 

New York (81) 

Minnesota (81) 

Connecticut (81) 

And the five lowest: 

West Virginia (75) 

Mississippi (75) 

Alabama (75) 

Kentucky (75) 

Arkansas (76) 

Here’s black life expectancy in these states: 

Hawaii (81) 

Minnesota (79) 

Connecticut (78) 

New York (78) 

California (76) 

Arkansas (73) 

Alabama (73) 

Kentucky (73) 

Mississippi (73) 

West Virginia (72) 

I don’t want to draw huge conclusions from this data. But it suggests a few things: 

You are likely to live longer if you have a higher-income. Not shocking. (In terms of average income per person, West Virginia and Kentucky are two of the poorest states. Hawaii, California and Connecticut are among the richest.) 

The states with longer life expectancies are those dominated by Democrats, those with low life expectancies are dominated by Republicans. It is likely that the more generous social safety nets (so more spending on Medicaid for example) in Democratic states contributes to longer lives. 

Race and place both matter. Because of long-standing racial inequalities, black people as a group have shorter life spans than white people in all of these states. But place really matters too. In the places where everyone is living longer, black people are living longer too. 

So life expectancy is slightly higher for a black person in New York (78) than a white one in Arkansas (76.) 

Similarly, a research project from the Brookings Institute and the NAACP found that life expectancy for black people in the Boston area is around 80 years old, one of the highest of any major metropolitan region in the country. It was around 77 in the Washington, D.C. area. It was about 72 in Louisville.

Louisville’s life expectancy for Black residents was 100th of the 115 metro areas in the study. 

It is almost certainly the case that Boston and D.C draw upper-income black people from across the country and the world in a way that Louisville doesn’t. (And those wealthier people live longer.) 

But that may not be the whole story. A black person who grew up in a middle-income household in Boston is likely to be in a household with about $36,000 of income by age 35, according to The Opportunity Atlas. That number is around $33,000 for the New York City area. It’s about $28,000 for Louisville and $29,000 for Nashville. 

Here is an academic article exploring these regional differences in more detail. (The piece suggests that these regional factors accumulate over time. So a person who moves from Alabama to Minnesota at age 65 may not live to be 81 instead of 75.) 

The Urban League 

More than two weeks ago, the Louisville Urban League announced Kish Cumi Price was “transitioning” out of her role as the organization’s president and chief executive. The statement included no detail about why Price was leaving. She had only been in the job for five months. 

It is not ideal that the city’s leading figure on racial issues left her job in the midst of major debate about race and Louisville (the DOJ report on policing) and it’s not publicly known why. Perhaps this is a personnel matter or a dispute not relevant to the broader public. Alternatively, her departure reflects some broader policy divides that deserve a public debate. 

It’s everywhere 

“Black residents of the city were particularly “over-policed,” the report found. “They are more likely to be stopped and searched, handcuffed, batoned and Tasered, are overrepresented in many serious crimes, and when they are victims of crime, they are less satisfied with the service they receive.” 

This is the Washington Post story about a recently-released report on the police ….in London, England. 

Just because a problem is ubiquitous doesn’t mean it’s unsolvable. But the solutions might be unconventional. 

The importance of money 

Across the United States, students from higher-income families generally have higher test scores and attend schools with higher average test scores. That creates complicated questions around causation and correlation. Are high-income people using their political power and/or money to get their kids into the best schools, and those schools then educating students into good test scores? 

Alternatively, are students in higher-income families being raised in situations with more money, parents with time to focus on schooling, stable housing, plentiful food and other advantages that result in better outcomes at school, so the schools with higher test scores are just doing the best job “recruiting” well-off parents? 

I tend to think that the second explanation is the stronger one. (So giving lower-income families more money might produce better test scores, as opposed to giving them better education and hoping that will result in them eventually having more income.) At the same time, some individual schools do boost student outcomes.

It’s worth thinking about this dynamic in a lot of contexts. Across Louisville public schools, 22 percent of black students in high school scored at least proficient on statewide reading tests, compared to about 50 percent of white students, according to state data from the 2021-2022 school year. That’s not an unusual gap. (Other states and cities have such gaps.) 

At Manual High School, one of the magnet schools in Louisville that is allowed to choose its students, 89 percent of white students were proficient, as were 54 percent of the black ones. At Male High School, the magnet that I attended that also can select students and exclude others, about 49 percent of Black students were proficient, as were 60 percent of white students. 

There are individual students who do exceptionally well. Where you are born does not determine where you will end up. 

But 

1. White students in Louisville schools on average come from higher-income families than black ones;

2. The students who attend Male and Manual are on average from higher-income families than the district overall; and

3. The black students at Male and Manual on average come from higher-incomes than the black students across the district.