In hotels, market research shows that "the consumer profile of the guest improves with more trips made and higher affluence; that this group is huge consumers of entertainment," said Derek White, the president of LodgeNet's Interactive division.
A study of public housing in Cleveland found that criminals tend to live in areas of higher affluence and move into areas of lower affluence to commit crimes.
A similar unexpected association between poorer survival and higher affluence was previously reported for children and young adults diagnosed with CNS tumours in Yorkshire (Feltbower et al, 2004).
Christopher DeMuth, president emeritus of the American Enterprise Institute, notes the interaction of high affluence and modern technologies.
High affluence and new technologies have, DeMuth believes, "led to unhealthy political practices". Time was, the three basic resources required for effective political action — discretionary time, the ability to acquire and communicate information and persuasion skills — were scarce and possessed only by elites.
Improving patient triage is a matter of importance, in particular, in case of high affluence to the ED, a situation where there is a risk of underestimating severity due to lack of time and means.
In the study, it was scored as a composite score and classified into three categories: low affluence (0 2), middle affluence (3 5) and high affluence (6 9).
For the analyses, we used a three-point ordinal scale, where FAS = 1 indicated low affluence; FAS = 2 indicated middle affluence, and FAS = 3 indicated high affluence.
Categories of county poverty were defined as: high outlier poverty, extremely high poverty, very high poverty, high poverty, neither, high affluence (low/very low poverty) and outlier affluence (low outlier poverty) [ 26].
After inspection of the resulting distribution of counties on the U.S. map we defined the following categories of concentrated spatial wealth: outlier poverty, extremely high poverty, very high poverty, high poverty, neither, high affluence and outlier affluence [ 26].
Sensitivity analyses, conducted in order to test the effects of family affluence when entered as a continuous variable, rather than the collapsed low, medium and high affluence categories, showed almost identical results (see online supplementary table S2).
