The Library
Society & Belief
16An Index Autopsy
We rebuilt a deprivation index from scratch with PCA — no housing costs — and compared it to the canonical ADI. They agree on the gradient and disagree violently about New York.
Does Generosity Pay — Everywhere?
Across 155 countries, people who give — money, time, or a hand to a stranger — rate their lives higher and feel better day to day. The link holds in rich countries and poor ones alike, and is strongest for giving money.
Does the Ring Still Matter?
For fifty years, married Americans have reported being happier than everyone else. The gap has barely budged — and most of it survives even after you account for who tends to marry.
Keeping Up With the County
Same paycheck, richer neighbors: across 2.1 million Gallup interviews, living among wealthier people lowers life evaluation for the middle and barely touches the rich — while the poor are unbothered or slightly lifted.
Out of Place — The Geography of the LGBT Well-Being Gap
Daily distress runs high everywhere, but how poorly LGBT Americans rate their lives widens where the county turns Republican and rural — and in those same hostile places, far fewer people disclose being LGBT at all.
Raised Poor, Locked Up
For boys raised by poor families, the odds of growing up incarcerated rise with neighborhood deprivation — and, on the very same streets, fall heavily by race.
Reading Is a Girls' Country
Across 12,360 school districts, girls out-read boys in 99.9 percent. Math is contested ground — and which side wins tracks the district's affluence with eerie regularity.
Religion's Conditional Dividend
Across 143 countries, people who call religion important rate their lives higher and feel better day to day — but mainly where life is hard. As nations grow richer and safer, the religious advantage bends toward zero, and in the wealthiest places it disappears.
The Born-Rich Premium
What does a rich birth buy? The Opportunity Atlas prices the class premium neighborhood by neighborhood — and it varies twofold across America.
The Company You Keep
Twenty-one billion Facebook friendships, one question: which kind of social capital actually predicts whether poor children rise? Cross-class friendship does. Volunteering, clubs, and tight-knit networks barely register.
The Eight Americas
A k-means clustering of 81,000 census tracts sorts the country into eight kinds of neighborhood — ten years of life expectancy apart at the extremes, each with its own version of an American life.
The Ninety-Year-Old Map
Federal appraisers graded American neighborhoods A through D in the late 1930s. Lay those grades over the 2020 census grid and life expectancy, children's adult incomes, and homeownership still sort by the colors.
The Optimism Gap
Across 2.46 million Gallup interviews, Black Americans expect their lives to rise far more than white Americans do at every income level — and the gap is widest among the poor, even though white Americans rate their current lives higher.
The Paradox That Didn't Hold
In the 1970s American women called themselves happier than men. A famous study watched that lead vanish. Extend the data eighteen more years and the decline doesn't continue — it dissolves into noise.
The Places That Beat the Model
Five census facts predict almost half the variation in neighborhood upward mobility. This story is about the other half — the counties whose poor children climb five or six percentiles higher than their demographics predict, and the sunbelt boomtowns that fall just as far short.
The Vanishing Cradle
America's birth count fell off a cliff when the pandemic hit and, four years later, still has not climbed back. But the baby bust was not one story — some counties lost a quarter of their newborns while a few exurbs gained two-thirds.