On the health of your community

"Austin Fitts has developed her own model of community health. She calls it the Popsicle Index. The Popsicle Index is the percentage of people in a community who think that an elementary-school child can safely walk to the neighborhood grocery and come home with a Popsicle—alone. When she was a little girl, Austin Fitts thinks that everybody in her old Philadelphia neighborhood thought that she could do that. And she did. The Popsicle Index was near 100 percent. Now, in that same neighborhood, going alone to the grocery to buy a Popsicle isn’t something very many mothers would allow. Fifty years later, the index has dropped to 10 percent, maybe lower."

--Michael Linton