The New York Times’ Upshot has another numbers crunch that uses six measures to identify the hardest places to live in America. The red states, including Arkansas, dominate on the wrong end of the school, as the map above shows.
In Arkansas, Lee County makes the “top” 10 of hardest living counties, ranked at 3,126 among the 3,135 measured. We had no Top 10 counties. Only Benton County runs on the right end in this ranking, coming in at 366 in a ranking of 3,135 U.S. counties. Here’s how it was compiled:
The Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.
It could be worse. Our counties are all better off than the worst in Kentucky. The worst of them is the focus of a feature in the Times Sunday magazine.
Arkansas Delta counties cluster down along the bottom 200 counties in the compilation.
Here you’ll find an interactive map that allows you to look at the scores of each individual county.