The Geography of Desperation

It’s not just the economic gap between the rich and poor that has grown wider: America has seen an overlapping, and even more troubling, gap in desperation across class as well as racial and ethnic lines. Much has been made of America’s deepening opioid crisis, especially among rural and working-class whites. A recent Brookings Institution study pinpoints where poor Americans are feeling desperation the most across the country as a whole.

The study—developed by leading happiness researcher Carol Graham, along with Sergio Pinto and John Juneau II—uses detailed data from the Gallup Organization to measure the incidence of three key indicators of desperation: worry, pain, and optimism (or lack thereof). These indicators are tracked among poor whites and poor minorities across the 50 states between 2010 and 2015. The data come largely from the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index, which surveyed roughly 175,000 people annually over this period.