The Geography of American Thriving

Between 2008 and 2017, Gallup’s U.S. Daily survey asked 2,456,863 Americans to place themselves on a ladder. The device is psychologist Hadley Cantril’s “ladder of life,” in continuous use since the 1960s: eleven rungs, where zero is the worst possible life you can imagine for yourself and ten is the best. Two questions follow. On which rung do you stand today? And on which rung do you expect to stand about five years from now?

Gallup compresses the two answers into three bands. Respondents who rate their present life at 7 or higher and their anticipated life at 8 or higher count as thriving; those who rate both present and future low count as suffering; everyone else is struggling. Over the full decade, 52.0% of interviews in this extract land in the thriving band, 44.3% in struggling, and 3.8% in suffering. The average respondent put their current life on rung 7.04.

Two ground rules before the maps. First, everything below concerns those evaluations — how people rate their lives, not how they experience them hour to hour; the two are related but distinct, and this essay stays strictly on the rating side. Second, this extract of the Gallup data carries no survey weights, so every figure here is an unweighted summary of whoever Gallup happened to reach — an enormous sample estimate, not an official population benchmark.

01A nineteen-point country

Averaged over a decade, the national thriving share barely moves. Across the country, it moves a great deal. Rank the fifty states and the District of Columbia by their unweighted thriving share and the spread from bottom to top runs about 19.1 percentage points. West Virginia anchors the floor at 45.5%. The District of Columbia sits at the ceiling, 64.6% — with an asterisk it will keep for the rest of this essay, because D.C. is a single dense, affluent city being graded against entire states.

Among the states proper, Hawaii leads at 60.8%, with Alaska (58.0%), Maryland (56.3%), Utah (55.6%), and Texas and Virginia (each 55.0%) close behind. The bottom of the table reads like a gazetteer of the old coal and factory belts: West Virginia, then Kentucky (47.4%), Arkansas (48.2%), Ohio (48.8%), and Wisconsin (49.0%).

02The terrain of high marks

Put the same numbers on a map and the ranking turns into terrain. A trough of low life evaluation runs down the Appalachian spine and bleeds west into the Ohio Valley and the mid-South. High shares pool where money and momentum pool: around Washington’s commuter counties, through Utah and pieces of the Mountain West, across urban Texas, and out in Hawaii and Alaska.

Switch the view to counties and the monoliths crack. Nearly every low-thriving state contains a high-thriving metro county, and nearly every high-thriving state has a rural fringe that rates its life more like West Virginia than like its own largest city. The county layer colors only the 2,013 counties where Gallup completed at least 150 interviews over the decade; the rest stay gray — unknown, not zero.

03What travels with thriving

Why these places? The interviews alone cannot say, but joining each county’s decade of answers to a snapshot of its circumstances — taken once, around 2018 — lines the candidates up side by side. Across the 1,352 counties with at least 300 interviews, median household income is the strongest single correlate of the thriving share, at r ≈ +0.58. The share of residents living in rural territory runs the other way, at −0.54. The local rate of deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide — the “deaths of despair” that Anne Case and Angus Deaton traced through these same years — correlates at −0.41 across the 1,204 larger counties where mortality data exist. A county’s average Republican margin across the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections sits at −0.39, its poverty rate at −0.26, and a widely used social-capital index barely registers, at +0.11.

Two readings of that list are tempting, and both are wrong. These are cross-sectional correlations against context measured once, so they cannot show that income raises life ratings or that despair lowers them — only that the same counties keep landing on the same ends. And the correlates overlap heavily: rural counties are poorer, poorer counties voted redder, and the counties hit hardest by despair mortality are often both. The scatterplot lets you hold the map in one hand and each correlate in the other.

One detail in the ledger is worth pausing on: the poverty rate (−0.26) tracks thriving far less tightly than median income (+0.58). In these data, how well the middle of a county lives says more about its life ratings than how many of its residents fall below the poverty line — a pattern worth carrying around, though a cross-section cannot explain it.

04Density and party, read carefully

Two cuts make the gradients concrete. Sort counties along the USDA’s rural–urban continuum and the thriving share steps down almost rung by rung, from 54.1% in the counties of the largest metros to 46.0% in the most remote rural counties — a gap of about eight points. Sort them instead by presidential lean, and solidly Democratic counties sit at 54.9% against 49.1% in solidly Republican ones — just under six.

The partisan cut is the one most likely to be over-read, so read it as written: it is descriptive. Redder counties are also more rural and lower-income, and nothing in a cross-section can apportion credit among those three intertwined facts. This is one gradient wearing three costumes, not three findings.

05What this shows — and what it doesn’t

• It measures evaluations, not experiences. The ladder asks people to judge their lives, and judged well-being behaves differently from moment-to-moment emotion — famously so in Kahneman and Deaton’s work, where income kept lifting life evaluations long after it stopped lifting the emotional texture of the day. Nothing here is a mood map.
• It is unweighted. With samples this large the estimates are very stable, but stability is not representativeness. Treat every number as a description of Gallup’s respondents, not a certified portrait of the population.
• It is a cross-section. County context comes from one snapshot, circa 2018, joined to all ten years of interviews. The correlations are context, not causes — and a county’s score reflects who lives there, through sorting and selective migration, as much as what living there does to anyone.
• The differences are real but modest. Nineteen points separate the extremes of a ranking; most of the group gaps are single digits, and even in West Virginia almost half of respondents were thriving. Geography shifts the odds. It does not write anyone’s answer.
• D.C. is a city. Its first-place 64.6% says more about dense, educated, high-income urban cores than about a fifty-first state outperforming the other fifty.

The two questions Gallup asks are deliberately placeless: your life, your ladder, your five years. The answers are anything but. Richer, denser, better-connected counties rate their lives higher; poorer, emptier, harder-hit ones rate theirs lower — year after year, across millions of interviews. The ladder is the same in every one of them. The ground it stands on is not. ■