01 September 2023

Where you live in America can have a major effect on how young you die | Colin Woodward

The truth of life expectancy in America is that places with comparable profiles — similar advantages and similar problems — have widely different average life outcomes depending on what part of the country they belong to.

America’s Surprising Partisan Divide on Life Expectancy

Centuries-old settlement patterns — and the attitudes they spawned about government — are to blame for differences in longevity between red southern states and bluer parts of the country.

Topographical U.S. map with silhouetted illustrations of a lifespan ranging from baby steps to senior walking.


I shared these maps with cardiologist Donald Lloyd-Jones, a past president of the American Heart Association who chairs the preventive medicine department at Northwestern University in Chicago, who said they didn’t surprise him at all. “There’s a reason why the Southeastern portion of this country is called the Stroke Belt: It’s because the rates of stroke per capita are substantially higher there and mirrored by rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and other risk factors.”

“The places on your map where you see orange and red have structural and systemic issues that limit people’s ability to have socioeconomic opportunity, access health care, or achieve maximum levels of education,” Lloyd-Jones added. “All of these policies affect your health and these disparities in longevity absolutely reflect social and structural and historical policies in those regions.”

At Nationhood Lab we wondered if all of this is might just be a reflection of wealth. Some American regions have always had higher standards of living than others because their cultures prioritize the common good over individual liberty, social equality over economic freedom and quality services more than low taxes. The Deep South was founded by English slave lords from Barbados who didn’t care about shared prosperity; The Puritan founders of Yankeedom — who thought God had chosen them to create a more perfect society — very much did, and it made the average person materially a lot better off, both then and now. Maybe the differences between the regions would go away if you compared just rich counties to one another or just the poor ones?

Nope.

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