That’s the overwhelming conclusion of a new Gallup-Healthways survey based on telephone interviews with 173,581 employed Americans over the past year.
The first chart shows the toll that commuting takes on physical health. Americans with longer commutes suffer higher levels of back pain, higher cholesterol, and higher levels of obesity. (more…)
This chart from Gallup shows the dramatic growth in the percentage of Americans who want to see smoking banned in public venues.
GOOD links this map from a new report on state obesity from the Trust for America’s Health.
A quarter or more of all adults are classified as obese in more than two-thirds of states. The fattest states are all in the South. Colorado, California, Montana, and Mid-Atlantic and New England states have the lowest rates of obesity.
Earlier this week, the American College of Sports Medicine released its new version of the American Fitness Index, which tracks the health and fitness level of America’s 50-largest metropolitan regions. The index is defined as a “composite of preventive health behaviors, levels of chronic disease conditions, health care access, and community resources and policies that support physical activity.” The table below shows the fitness levels for these 50 metros.
Source: American Fitness Index
Are we moving beyond the auto age? Writing in Esquire, Nate Silver provides hard statistical evidence that America’s once-overwhelming car-culture and driving habits have peaked. This article in Advertising Age (h/t: Patrick Adler) provides additional evidence that we may well be in the early stages of a reset in attitudes about driving and car ownership, especially among younger folks. Here are some key statistics from the article:
- “In 1978, nearly half of 16-year-olds and three-quarters of 17-year-olds in the U.S. had their driver’s licenses, according to Department of Transportation data. By 2008, the most recent year data was available, only 31 percent of 16-year-olds and 49 percent of 17-year-olds had licenses, with the decline accelerating rapidly since 1998.”
- “Twenty-somethings went from driving a disproportionate amount of the nation’s highway miles in 1995 to under-indexing for driving in 2009.”
- “It’s not just new drivers driving less. The share of automobile miles driven by people ages 21 to 30 in the U.S. fell to 13.7 percent in 2009 from 18.3 percent in 2001 and 20.8 percent in 1995.”
The National Bureau of Economic Research says we’re not out of the recessionary woods yet, though some think the economy is looking up. Floyd Norris of the Times, for one, thinks the numbers are pointed in the right direction. (More over at The Atlantic Wire). Restaurants certainly seem to be rebounding.
Today, I stumbled across another intriguing indicator. It’s called the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity – LIRA for short. Produced regularly by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the index measures “national homeowner spending on improvements for the current quarter and subsequent three quarters,” and aims to track “future turning points in the business cycle of the home improvement industry.” The graph charts the trend. (more…)
“Why Ricky Martin’s Coming Out Wasn’t Big News” - Julia Baird’s recent Newsweek article – makes the important point that nations with more progressive attitudes toward homosexuality are also happier and healthier. She writes:
Still, while it may have been a wrenching decision for Martin personally, there was something refreshing about eye rolling replacing homophobic invective. We should want his coming out to not be a big deal in whichever country we might live in. New research shows that tolerance of homosexuality is likely to mean we live in a democratic, developed, wealthy country. It should also mean we live in a well-educated country. And it may well mean we live in a relatively happy country.
She kindly cites my own recent research with Charlotta Mellander and Peter Rentfrow on happiness, socioeconomic structures, and tolerance. And she quotes Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute on findings from Ronald Ingelhart’s World Values Survey which looks closely at this issue. (more…)
Check out this map of the geography of Christianity in the United States. It’s one of a series of mind-blowing maps prepared by the brilliant cartographers behind the site FloatingSheep.
The geographic pattern is striking.
“Catholics are most visible in much of the Northeast and Canada, with Lutherans taking the Midwest, Baptists the Southeast, and Mormons unsurprisingly taking much of the mountain states. Methodists, interestingly, seem to primarily be most visible in a thin red line between the Southern Baptists and everyone else.”
Now check out their map of Christianity in Europe, where they note the “fascinating split between Orthodox Eastern Europe, Protestant Germany, and Catholic everywhere else.” (more…)
Here’s one hot off the press.
A new paper with Jason Rentfrow and Charlotta Mellander looks at the role of post-industrial structures – that is, the creative class and human capital as well as values toward openness and tolerance – on the happiness of nations. Our main hypothesis is that these structures and values shape happiness in ways that go beyond the previously examined effects of income. Here’s more from the abstract:
Drawing from previous theory and research, we measured post-industrial structures in terms of higher-level education and the share of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based/creative work. Post-industrial values were measured in terms of acceptance of racial and ethnic minorities and of gays and lesbians. Our measure of happiness is derived from a large-scale global survey of life satisfaction conducted by the Gallup Organization. We controlled for income in our analyses and divided our sample into high- and low-income countries to explore whether income has different effects on countries at different stages of economic development.
Our results indicate that post-industrial structures and values have a stronger effect on happiness in higher-income countries where the standard of living has surpassed a certain level. Income, on the other hand, has a stronger impact on happiness in low-income countries. Thus, we propose that when income rises beyond a certain level, a new system of post-industrial values centered on education, creativity, and openness become better predictors of happiness than income.
The full paper is here.
Just finished a new paper in what’s become an interesting – and fun – new area for me. Our research examines the factors that are associated with smoking and obesity – two significant health problems and contributors to leading causes of death.
There’s been a lot of research on smoking and obesity among individuals and some which looks at geographic patterns. Still, what we find is interesting. There is considerable variation in smoking and obesity across states. And smoking and obesity are both closely associated with post-industrial socioeconomis structures, that is high levels of knowledge; professional, creative work; and high levels of college-educated adults. The results holds even when we control for the level of economic output.
What this all seems to mean is that places that have transitioned to postindustrialism go beyond economics and innovation. In addition to generating better-paying jobs and having higher levels of income and innovation, these sorts of places appear to have better health outcomes as well, and they do so in ways that go beyond the effects of just higher levels of economic output. The effects of these structures work in addition to the effects of Gross State Product per capita. The full paper is here.
