Worlds Apart: Income Gap, Education Gap and Life Expectancy Gap

A piece in the New York Times looks at the contrasts - indeed, different worlds - between Fairfax County, Virginia, and McDowell County, West Virginia.  The contrast could likewise have been made between affluent, educated and much healthier Fairfax County, and rural counties in Southwestern Virginia that have more in common with McDowell County than with Fairfax County.  What the have not counties have in common is that they are poor, uneducated and, although the article doesn't focus on it, culturally backwards and  not welcoming to outsiders or diversity.  Indeed, these have not counties represent a perfect storm that makes them among the least likely places that new, progressive businesses would seek to locate or expand.  As a result, they remain captive to the coal industry which devastates many lives just as it devastates the environment.  And this backwardness and associated poverty literally is costing lives in the form of much lower life expectancies.  Yet these areas - and their typically Republican politicians - refuse to grasp that their rejection of modernity is one of the causes of the areas' plight.  Here are article highlights:

Fairfax County, Va., and McDowell County, W.Va., are separated by 350 miles, about a half-day’s drive. Traveling west from Fairfax County, the gated communities and bland architecture of military contractors give way to exurbs, then to farmland and eventually to McDowell’s coal mines and the forested slopes of the Appalachians. Perhaps the greatest distance between the two counties is this: Fairfax is a place of the haves, and McDowell of the have-nots. Just outside of Washington, fat government contracts and a growing technology sector buoy the median household income in Fairfax County up to $107,000, one of the highest in the nation. McDowell, with the decline of coal, has little in the way of industry. Unemployment is high. Drug abuse is rampant. Median household income is about one-fifth that of Fairfax.

One of the starkest consequences of that divide is seen in the life expectancies of the people there. Residents of Fairfax County are among the longest-lived in the country: Men have an average life expectancy of 82 years and women, 85, about the same as in Sweden. In McDowell, the averages are 64 and 73, about the same as in Iraq.

There have long been stark economic differences between Fairfax County and McDowell. But as their fortunes have diverged even further over the past generation, their life expectancies have diverged, too. In McDowell, women’s life expectancy has actually fallen by two years since 1985; it grew five years in Fairfax.

Living in Fairfax is different than living in McDowell. In Fairfax, there are ample doctors, hospitals, recreation centers, shops, restaurants, grocery stores, nursing homes and day care centers, with public and private entities providing cradle-to-grave services to prosperous communities. 

Coal miners[in McDowell County]  still dig into and blast off the tops of steep Appalachian hills. But the industry that once provided thousands of jobs is slowly disappearing, and the region’s entrenched poverty has persisted. The unemployment rate is 8.8 percent, down from more than 13 percent in the worst of the recession. The current number would be even higher if more residents hadn’t simply given up looking for work.

 

Government assistance accounts for half of the income of county residents. Social workers described shortages of teachers, nurses, doctors, surgeons, mental health professionals and addiction-treatment workers. There is next to no public transportation.

[T]he contrast between McDowell and Fairfax shows just how deeply entrenched these trends are, with consequences reaching all the way from people’s pocketbooks to their graves.

Having traveled through and taken cases for those in Southwest Virginia, I do not see how the diverging trends can be halted - at least not until there is a major change in the mindset in rural areas of Virginia.  No one who has the option to move away will likely stay and the downward spiral will continue.  Meanwhile, businesses and jobs will located to more accepting and open minded areas.  And for gays living in these rural areas, flight or suicide will likely remain attractive.  Ignorance and backwardness carries a terrible price.