1/it is neighborhood, not county or state that serves as the most relevant geographic predictor of opportunity- summarizes @nytimes & this bears in many opioid geographic analyses of the last 2 years nytimes.com/2019/02/12/ups…

2/The most celebrated paper put forward as refuting the entire Deaths of Despair concept, by Chris Ruhm, relied on COUNTY-level indicators of economic opportunity, & I remember seeing that & thinking that was quite wrong as.vanderbilt.edu/econ/sempapers…

3/My child’s public elementary school had both (a) wealthiest neighborhood (fancy houses) (b)highest percent of kids on free/reduced lunches - even in a county level, opportunity and social resources diverge widely - and that means community effects are not just state or county

4/Thus even the “moral hazard of naloxone” paper / analyzing a state level policy declaration (as if it could even be possible that naloxone reached entire state) and state/county outcomes, leaves a lot unexplored poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?I…

5/State or county level predictors for neighborhood level realities are like guessing how salty the soup will be by asking “how much salt is in the kitchen?” If you find a correlation that is, eh, interesting. The #opioid research field is flooded with such papers. Buyer beware!