Of all 26 measures, none follows neighborhood deprivation as tightly as cigarette smoking: ρ = 0.8with the Area Deprivation Index across ZIP codes. Know a neighborhood's ADI and you can predict its smoking rate remarkably well. Which makes the failuresof that prediction the interesting part — they isolate everything deprivation can't explain.
Smoking against deprivation
Each dot is a ZIP code; the line is the quadratic fit used to compute residuals — hover for the ZIP
Subtract poverty, and history remains
Map the residual — actual smoking minus deprivation-predicted smoking — and the income map of America disappears, replaced by a cultural one. The contiguous red mass is the tobacco belt: Tennessee (+2.8 points), Kentucky, West Virginia — places that grew tobacco, worked it, and smoke more than their economics alone would predict. Nevada and Alaska join them by a different route (casino and frontier culture). On the blue side, Utah smokes 2.6 points less than its deprivation predicts — the LDS effect — joined by heavily Hispanic border areas and immigrant metros, consistent with the well-documented immigrant smoking advantage.
The residual map: smoking minus what deprivation predicts
Red = smokes more than predicted · blue = less
State residuals, ranked
Population-weighted average residual (percentage points of smoking prevalence)
The policy reading: deprivation sets the baseline, but the residuals prove smoking is not economically fated. Utah's ZIP codes face the same prices and the same stress gradients as everyone else's — norms moved the number anyway. What culture can do, policy and cessation infrastructure have room to do too, and the red residual states are the map of where that headroom is largest.