Newport gets study’s highest quality-of-life score

The Newport Beach area has the highest quality-of-life index in a new study by the nonprofit Social Sciences Research Council that examined racial and geographic disparities in well-being across California.

Researchers combined data on educational attainment, salary and life expectancy to create scores measuring the quality of life in each neighborhood in the state. The gap between the lowest and highest scores was widest in a research area that includes Orange and Los Angeles counties, researchers said.

Six of the 10 lowest-scoring neighborhoods were in Los Angeles. Watts got the lowest score overall.

The data used in the study weren’t new, researchers say. But aggregating the data in an index showed that a person’s race or ethnicity was “tremendously influential” in predicting quality of life, said researcher Kristen Lewis.

It’s not clear why race and ethnicity accounted for so much of the disparity in quality of life, Lewis said, but part of the reason could be residential segregation. People of the same races tend to live in the same areas and often have the same levels of health, education and income. Racial disparities in the quality-of-life scores also mirror geographic disparities, Lewis said.

“Overall, over everything, race and ethnicity was the major factor,” Lewis said.

The study was patterned after the United Nations Human Development Index, which aims to be an alternative measure of economic growth that focuses on improving human lives. The index was inspired by the ideas of Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, who felt that economists focused too much on tracking the growth of gross domestic product, or GDP, and often ignored data that tracked human suffering.

“We need to supplement our financial and economic metrics with facts about the lives of ordinary people,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, the report’s co-author.

--Frank Shyong/Los Angeles Times