In 2013, President Obama described income inequality as posing “a fundamental threat to the American Dream.” Income inequality is on the rise in the United States, but does this imply that there has been a decline in American individuals’ well-being?
Recent discussions of income inequality tend to equate a decrease in income inequality with an improvement in well-being, but this may not necessarily be true in all circumstances. This begs the question: what is well-being, and how do we quantify it?
One common way of looking at well-being is through median household income. Below is an interactive, county-level map of median household income in 2012 colored by quintiles. Click on a county for its income level.
Quantifying well-being is by no means an unexplored topic. Two more complex examples of quantifying well-being are through health outcomes and a weighted aggregation of economic indicators.
Below, I include an example based on four variables:
Unemployment (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2012)
Poverty (from the U.S. Census Bureau 2012)
Obesity (from the Centers for Disease Control 2012)
Population that Did Not Finish High School (from the American Community Survey 2009 - 2013)
By breaking each of these variables into quantiles and thus standardizing each variable’s units, we can look at counties’ relative well-being with respect to multiple variables rather than just one.
When using multiple variables, however, another important question arises: how do we decide on weightings?
One way is to simply weight all variables equally. Below is a map of counties’ relative well-being with respect to these four variables weighting each variable equally. Counties in blue have higher well-being and counties in red have lower well-being. To see a county’s specific values, click on the county of interest.
Comparing this Index Map to the Median Household Income Map, there are some glaring differences in implied relative well-being. In particular, note how much worse California and Alaska appear using the Index. It is also worth noting that there are areas that look the same under both the Index map as well as the Median Household income map, in particular parts of the South and almost all of Wyoming.
It’s safe to say that many factors play a role in an individual’s overall well-being; however, the choice of weights in creating an Index of Well-Being is highly subjective, regardless of which factors are included. Rather than make my own assumptions, I instead propose an interface that allows the user to decide on these weights.
I have created an interactive visualization tool that allows users to subjectively explore well-being in the United States at the county level by choosing their own weightings for these four variables. See for yourself!
Although there are only four variables for the user to choose from so far, it would be easy to include multiple years of data in this interface. Furthermore, by including additional variables such as economic, health, crime, education, psychological, and environmental components, users would be able to visually explore interactions between these features and weigh them as they see fit. \(\hspace{4ex} _\blacksquare\)