By Drawing 50 'States' According to Income, Study Reveals 'Developing Countries' Within the U.S.

The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, but it would look dramatically different if its 50 states were organized according to income instead of geography. If that were the case, residents of the poorest state in the union would have a median household income that’s just above the federal poverty line for a family of four. They would also expect to live shorter lives than people in more than half of the world's countries. It's not a pretty picture, according to the researchers who carried out this thought experiment.

"In essence, there are several developing countries hidden within the borders of the United States — regions defined, in this case, by poverty," they wrote in a study published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health. "The 'state' of poverty in this country is dramatic and deeply disturbing." The research team, from East Tennessee State University, wrote that they could get a better sense of the “actual impact of poverty on health in the United States” if they focused on “the poorest counties in the nation, regardless of where they are geographically located.”

So they took the country’s 3,141 counties and sorted them according to their median household income, the amount at which half of households in a county had higher earnings and half had lower earnings. The income data came from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. To make sure the rankings weren’t skewed by a single fluky year, the researchers used income data from 2009 to 2013 and took the average over those five years...