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Comment by kinkrtyavimoodh | Hacker News Reader

Coastal America and rest of America might be a better way to cut it.

Not really, there’s countless cities with tons of well off upper middle class people in the middle of the country.

Metro-Denver, Metro-Austin/Dallas/Huston, Metro-Atlanta, Metro-Nashville, Metro-Chicago, Metro-Detroit, Metro-Minneapolis, etc. etc. etc.

I’d say it’s more city/suburban vs rural. This doesn’t account for the poor & homeless in all of America’s inner cities, but does a better job explaining.

Maybe “Fortune 500 headquarters adjacent” is the better indicator. The towns with big global companies almost always have affluent suburbs surrounding them. Even Cincinnati has tons of affluent people due to P&G.

I think you have to go even finer grained than that.

Chicago, for example. My old stomping grounds. The inequality within that city is stark. Glaring. The South and West sides are a world apart from the North side.

I guess the easiest way to slice it would be knowledge labor vs. unskilled labor. Regardless of where you live.

One side of the street is Little Italy, the other side is not someplace to hang out after dark.

That Andersonville to Uptown transition can be a shock.

I know a few multi-millionaires in Idaho and Utah that live very nicely.

In SF or LA they'd be middle-class.

It's not just about wealth in dollars, it's about purchasing power.

Hell of a lot of farmers buying $75k diesel trucks for cash, rotating quarter million dollar equipment through the inventory, sitting on 100 head of cattle and 1000+ acres and wearing carhartts, wranglers and beat up boots. Every now and again a friend of a friend posts a pic on facebook from their 40' boat up on the lake.

It's a bit more intermingled. For example, Williamson County, TN (Nashville suburbs) is one of the 10 highest-income counties in the entire country. The Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, and Denver suburbs are also very affluent.

Wikipedia's collected some of the recent per-county census data here, although that isn't a perfect metric since states vary a lot in county size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...

In general there's a good/bad outcomes split within (almost?) every major American city between the affluent and the poor neighborhoods. I haven't verified this with the life-expectancy data, but I would bet it differs more between rich vs. poor areas within each state, than it does between coastal and non-coastal states.

Tennessee is a tax haven for the wealthy who don't want to be in Florida. These states have a more regressive economy because the un-wealthy have to shoulder more of the burden of financing their government.

I don't think its so geographically aligned like that. Plenty of rich areas in Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix etc.

While that is true, I think that some of these things are tied to local culture too, which is why the Coastal distinction does have some merit.

If you generally are in the Bay Area or LA you rarely see the level of obesity you see in say Houston despite the fact that both areas despite being rich have their fair share of the poor too.

Similarly for smoking. It's exceedingly rare to see public smoking in the Bay Area.

Similarly for diets. When traveling in the South I was amazed at just how ridiculously unhealthy the average food eaten by the average person there was. Everything deep fried, laden with calories, consumed along with sugary drinks.

It's still regional rather than simply everyone vs. coastal. Not sure if it's fair to lump in the wealthier Rocky Mountain states like Colorado or Utah in with say the butter and cornfed Midwest.

Data is 5 to 6 years old:

County level:

https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/life-expectancy-by-c...

State and county level:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/life-expectancy/...

At the county level I dont think it neatly lines up to coasts vs interior. There's definitely a serious problem of the interior southeast though

Not really, no. Many of the coastal cities are more stratified and economically segregated than many of the non-coastal ones, but they still have a sizable lower-class population. So the precarious people in the high-poverty areas are much more hidden from the "typical" view of someone with some money.

Food deserts and gang violence - both accelerated by concentrated poverty - are a couple of ways this manifests in some of the "elite" cities.

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