Communities Moving Ahead, Falling Behind: Evidence from the Index of Deep Disadvantage

• Author: H. Luke Shaefer,Jasmine Simington,Vincent A. Fusaro
• Published date: 01 May 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/00027162211035966
• Date: 01 May 2021
• Subject Matter: Pockets of Success and Distress

292 ANNALS, AAPSS, 695, May 2021

DOI: 10.1177/00027162211035966

Communities

Moving Ahead,

Falling Behind:

Evidence from

the Index of

Deep

Disadvantage

By

VINCENT A. FUSARO,

H. LUKE SHAEFER,

and

JASMINE SIMINGTON

1035966ANN The Annals Of The American AcademyCommunities Moving Ahead, Falling Behind

research-article2021

Using a multidimensional index weighting factors

related to income, health, and social mobility—the

Index of Deep Disadvantage (IDD)—we rank the well-

being of disadvantaged U.S. counties (initial scores

below the median IDD) when they were on the cusp of

the Great Recession and then again well into the recov-

ery. We compare the characteristics of counties that

saw improvements to those that saw declines. We find

that a clear majority of counties were stable in relative

rank. Counties showing improvement tended to have

been worse off prerecession than counties where well-

being declined. Improving counties were less likely to

be urban, tended to have smaller fractions of the popu-

lation identifying as Black and larger fractions as white,

and had a lower proportion of jobs in manufacturing.

Stable counties were, on average, the worst off pre-

recession and thus remained the worst off near the end

of the recovery. All county groups improved in income

and employment through the recovery, but these

advances were not consistently associated with gains in

other areas such as incidence of low-weight births.

Keywords: Index of Deep Disadvantage; Great

Recession; community well-being; eco-

nomic recovery

The Great Recession of the late 2000s was

the worst and longest-lasting downturn

since the Great Depression. It forced many

Vincent A. Fusaro is an assistant professor in the

Boston College School of Social Work. His research

examines the U.S. welfare state for families with a par-

ticular focus on state-level policy, including the rela-

tionship between state policy differences and material

hardships and the influences on state policy design.

H. Luke Shaefer is Hermann and Amalie Kohn Professor

of Social Policy and associate dean for research and

policy engagement at the Ford School of Public Policy

at the University of Michigan. He is also professor of

social work and director of Poverty Solutions, an inter-

disciplinary, presidential initiative.

Jasmine Simington is a PhD candidate in public policy

and sociology at the University of Michigan’s Ford

School of Public Policy.

Correspondence: fusarov@bc.edu

COMMUNITIES MOVING AHEAD, FALLING BEHIND 293

workers into long-term unemployment and others to withdraw from the labor

market, and it increased the risk of underemployment for those who remained

employed (Grusky, Western, and Wimer 2011; Couch et al. 2018; Kroft et al.

2016). This downturn was followed by what some now call the “long recovery,”

which, while protracted, eventually became by some measures the strongest in

history. Ultimately, the gains of the recovery even reached less-skilled workers,

resulting in earnings growth, declines in poverty and food insecurity, and other

positive trends (Ziliak, this volume). The harms of the Great Recession and the

benefits of the long recovery did not, however, affect all people and places equally.

It remains important to understand the differential consequences of this shock.

In this article, we use a novel index of community-level economic well-being,

a time-varying version of the Index of Deep Disadvantage (IDD), to examine the

overall trajectories of communities from prior to the Great Recession to well into

the subsequent recovery. The IDD is a score, produced using principal compo-

nent analysis (PCA), that quantifies community conditions using a range of fac-

tors, including measures of income, health, and social mobility. It recognizes that

communities might experience adverse conditions, or “disadvantage,” across

different dimensions, and that examining any one indicator incompletely repre-

sents a community’s overall well-being. The IDD allows us to consider whether

overall conditions in communities improved or declined during these tumultuous

years. We then analyze both the IDD component variables and other measures

to identify, first, the geographic, demographic, and economic factors associated

with different trajectories; and, second, the nature of change for communities

with different trajectories.

We operationalize “community” by using counties as the unit of analysis.

County-level data are available for key measures both prior to and following the

recession. Community could be defined at still finer units, such as the city/town or

the neighborhood, and a wealthy locale and an impoverished locale within the

same county might have experienced very different effects from the Great

Recession. Data, however, are often limited at these very fine levels during the time

period of interest. In much of the United States, counties are an important level of

political organization, so our approach makes maximal use of available data at a

meaningful level of geography, but with a key limitation. Restricting our sample to

counties that were disadvantaged prior to the recession—scoring below the median

on our index—we find that a clear majority of counties can be classified as “stable,”

moving relatively little in rank over the course of the recession and the recovery.

Approximately 17 percent of counties we call “risers” because they moved up the

IDD rankings at least one ventile (groups created by rank-ordering the counties by

IDD score, then dividing into twenty evenly sized tranches), and approximately 16

percent we call “decliners” because they moved down the rankings at least one

ventile. Stable counties that did not change position generally were the most disad-

vantaged prior to the Great Recession compared to rising and declining counties

and, thus, remained the worst off near the end of the recovery.

Although more disadvantaged overall on our initial index, counties that

improved from prior to the recession into the recovery were better off than other

counties on some of the individual index indicators: they had, on average, lower