America is the land of unequal opportunity. These 13 maps show how class, education, and health inequities all intersect - with nonwhite, rural areas hit especially hard.

Andy KierszApr 30, 2021, 18:24 IST

A composite map overlaying median household income, poverty, disability rates, and broadband internet access. Some parts of the country face many interlocking struggles.Insider/Andy Kiersz

Inequities in America literally overlap.
Disparities in health, income, education - they all map onto the same areas.
Many of the hardest-hit areas are nonwhite and rural.

At Insider, we make a lot of maps. And in my years of making dozens upon dozens of maps illustrating different aspects of American economic, social, and political life, I've noticed that many of them look strikingly similar. Maybe you've seen the pattern, too.

The coasts and other big cities are wealthy, healthy, and well-educated. But many rural areas, particularly in the South, face overlapping crises tied to economic, health, and social factors.

This mapmaking is part of what researchers call "economic geography," or the study of how factors like business and personal wealth vary from place to place. It helps us understand how the places people live materially affect their lives.

It can show lots of things. In many parts of the country, decades of underinvestment have led to broad swaths of the map with low household incomes, high poverty rates, less education, poor health outcomes, and even a lack of access to services like high-speed internet. And all of these things intertwine.

Many of these areas are deeply rural. Big cities and their suburbs, especially on the affluent coasts, enjoy robust economies and their benefits, while many more sparsely populated areas remain economically marginalized. Many, but not all, of the hard-hit areas in the following maps have large populations of color, showing another dimension of the ongoing racial inequities we face.

Read on to see how many of America's problems overlap.

In much of the US, it's harder for children to climb the economic ladder

The share of adults with a degree is much higher in big cities and college towns.

Another place where the urban-rural divide is clear is home values.

Median household income tends to be much higher in big cities and their suburbs than in rural areas.

Poverty follows a very similar pattern to income, unsurprisingly.

There were pockets of high unemployment before the pandemic in many of the same places.

The share of people without health insurance varies by state, with those that adopted Obamacare's Medicaid expansion tending to have higher insurance rates than those that didn't.

The economic disparities also show up in people's health.

Even broadband internet access shows a similar pattern.

Across US history, the types of inequities across class lines we've been looking at have been intimately tied up with racial inequities.

Similarly, some areas with large Latino populations in the Southwest had high poverty rates and low incomes.

Areas with large American Indian and Alaska Native populations also face similar problems.

Some predominantly white areas also face serious challenges.

Place matters, and it shows how many of America's problems and inequities are interconnected.

A composite map overlaying median household income, poverty, disability rates, and broadband internet access. Some parts of the country face many interlocking struggles. Insider/Andy Kiersz

This composite map, which overlays median household income, poverty, disability rates, and broadband internet access, shows the extent to which the same places in the country struggle with all these issues.

Understanding the overlap between economic, health, educational, and other disparities is a crucial step to solving those inequities. Seeing how they interact with one another, as in the maps above, can help with that understanding.

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