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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

You dramatically overestimate how much of an economic difference there is between MD and WV: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vwpy8_glsgc/Vi5llZ9ZILI/AAAAAAAAI.... Adjusting for purchasing power, the difference in median income is just 10%. It’s like the difference between Belgium and Australia.

On the flip side, there is actually quite a difference between states like New York (second poorest in the US) and Virginia. And there is a very large internal migration from states like New York to states like virginia.

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Having driven all over both MD and WV, both in cities and country. they are _very_ different. I also think that Belgium and Australia are very different in many ways, but they're also on opposite sides of the earth, whereas, as was pointed out, MD and WV share a border. I've also been all over NY and VA and would say they are more similar compared to the WV vs MD comparison. I'm not sure where you saw that NY is the second poorest in the US... would be interested to see a source on that.

Median doesn't tell me much because it doesn't describe the skewness of the distribution of incomes. Without looking, I bet that both: 1) max income is higher in MD than in WV 2) there are more people at higher incomes in MD than in WV

So I looked it up for MD [0] and WV [1] and while they don't really help with my conjectures, MD has a higher per capita income ($24,774 in WV vs $39,070 in MD) and lower poverty rate (19.1% in WV vs 9.3% in MD).

Also interesting to note from those sources that they have basically the same retail sales per capita and rate of persons without health insurance (although MD has about half the disability rate).

[0]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/MD [1]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/WV

I recently visited WV and I found it an interesting contradiction. A lot of the major infrastructure I saw was in perfectly fine condition, even quite good in many places. But in a lot of the little towns the poverty was palpable. Houses in such an amazing state of disrepair with patches cobbled on top of patches. Then you drive into the hills around the town and sooooo beautiful, big houses on big plots of land, etc. It was gorgeous to drive through and see ... from the inside of our air conditioned van ;-).

I wonder how long until someone builds a high speed commuter line into the heart of WV from DC. There is probably an obvious reason not to, but from my west coast perspective it seems like a good idea.

West Virginia benefited for a long time from being represented by Robert Byrd, a powerful and savvy U.S. senator who was adept at directing federal dollars into his state to pay for nice infrastructure and federal jobs (the FBI, among other agencies, has a major center in WV).

At the same time, much of WV's private economy was centered around extraction and manufacturing, both of which have declined over the decades.

There's a big highway under construction into the center of WV, currently called "Corridor H", that is intended to link up with 66, a major artery in and out of the DC metro area.

I think it's unlikely that high speed rail gets built in that corridor any time soon, simply because high speed rail in general seems unlikely in the U.S. right now.

> I wonder how long until someone builds a high speed commuter line into the heart of WV from DC. There is probably an obvious reason not to, but from my west coast perspective it seems like a good idea.

I grew up in MD and spent a lot of time in WV. It's a beautiful state with a lot of wonderful people. It has a modest crime rate and a murder rate typically 1/3 lower than the US rate. And of course as noted it's quite poor relatively speaking. Sub par economic outcomes is one of the long-term constants of WV. You will often notice the difference in the quality of the roads immediately when you cross into WV from MD or VA.

Here's one big reason why that high-speed line will never happen from DC to eg Morgantown or Charleston WV: the population of West Virginia hasn't increased since the 1930s. 1.8m people in 1935, 1.8m today (and falling). The demand just is never going to be there, given the extreme cost to build infrastructure in the US.

The puzzle piece you are missing is topography. Load up a topo map of the state sometime. Nearly all of it is a twisted, practically fractal landscape of hills/mountains.

And unlike some other regions known for mountains (like New England) there are no (relatively) wide valleys between them.

It's wild, beautiful, and absolutely awful for building even a decent sized town in. It's why the few cities in the states are at the far edges, and even they are hilly. It's also obviously terrible for building transport infrastructure to get anywhere quickly.

That is an excellent point. The topography makes it beautiful, but now that you mention it, I can see how it would make building an expensive hassle.

I've also often driven through both quite a bit when I lived up north.

I'm not sure I could tell you if I was in (non-coastal) rural MD or rural WV (same as I'm not sure I could tell you if I was in Fairmont, Cumberland or Winchester).

The "second poorest" is likely a misquote. The Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel has a notably high official poverty rate due to the lifestyle of the people living there. This is one village in one county. The entire state in aggregate is not anywhere near the poorest even with NYC removed.

New York has the second lowest purchasing-power adjusted median income. On the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure (which accounts for cost of living), New York is the third poorest, with 17.9% of people living in poverty (versus 14.8% for West Virginia): https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio....

CA does very poorly by that measure. Both of these states have large rural populations (which bring down the median income), as well as large urban centers (which bring up the cost of living).

I don't think I estimated the size of difference at all. Are you suggesting that there is a cutoff below which differences in income don't affect where people decide to live? Is the difference between NY to VA above or below that cutoff?

I guess my main point is that we take this freedom for granted in the U.S. and generally folks don't examine it, or consider it to be good, or consider it not bad enough to be worth changing. I can tell you that there is zero public concern in VA about economic migrants from NY state.

An oversight in your observation is failing to account for the fact that equilibriation processes are slower and less dramatic when there are smaller differences between two things. E.g. dropping ice onto a hot pan is quite dramatic. Dropping 60 degree water into 70 degree water not so much.

> Are you suggesting that there is a cutoff below which differences in income don't affect where people decide to live?

Of course there is, for plenty of reasons:

- Moving away from friends and family is not free, is risky financially (what if your new job does not pan out), and is often simply not something people want

- Population-wide differences do not guarantee that you personally will gain anything by moving (correlation vs causation)

- Small differences in average incomes are imperceptible to most people, and the quality of average person's financial analysis is lacking. For example, looking at just median income ignores differences in cost of living, quality of government services, lifestyle, and anything occupation-specific.

- There is often more variation in median income within a state (e.g. urban vs rural areas) than across states. Migration from rural to urban areas is a thing.

- etc.

> And there is a very large internal migration from states like New York to states like Virginia

I don't feel particularly qualified in this area, it's an interesting question though; but, this really needs a citation. I think you're making a very strong claim here, that there is a "very large" migration from New York to Virginia -- although I have a problem with the qualifier "states like" -- what does that mean? Blue/red states? Northeast/South? Does "states like Virginia" include Florida, because that feels like a pretty strong outlier for the rest of the South.

In any case, here's a little information I've found, which I don't have the time right now to seriously analyze to support or refute your statement

* https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/moves-from-so... * ttps://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/demo/geographic-mobility/cps-2018.html

Then there's the issue of comparing median income, without including average or standard deviation in the analysis. And while I can see the value of adjusting for Regional Price Parity, I would be curious to see a county-by-county breakdown of New York state -- I would guess the burough of Manhattan ("New York County" apparently) would also be a dramatic outlier, statistically, compared to the rest of the state.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics, I need to see a lot more to feel convinced of either argument.

The people in rural, red areas are usually concerned about urban, blue immigrants- they drive up prices, have an outsized effect in politics, then bitch about how things aren't as great as where they came from. I've seen this with New Yorkers in Virginia, Californians in Colorado, and Washingtonians in Montana.

See: http://thecontextofthings.com/2014/04/23/people-are-leaving-.... Domestic migration is flowing from New York, LA, etc., to southern cities like Charlotte, Houston, etc., where purchasing power is higher. New York lost 1.5 million net residents to domestic migration from 2001 to 2008. (I.e. 1.5 million more people left New York for another state than left another state for New York.)

> New York (second poorest in the US)

On what basis? It ranks 15th for median household income.

Median income adjusted for cost of living (which is the usual way of comparing income between countries).

Thanks!

I would not characterize it as the "usual" way of comparing incomes. It's useful in some contexts but the adjustment can mask differences in local quality of life that matter to people.

When comparing countries, as I said, the basis of comparison is almost invariably PPP GDP per capita, not nominal GDP per capita.

> > New York (second poorest in the US)

> On what basis?

Probably the same basis by which California is the poorest: statewide cost-of-living adjusted poverty line.

There's a number of ways this measure is potebtially misleading; for instance, both New York and California are diverse states where the local cost of living varies considerably, and the numbers for any CoL adjusted measure would look very different if instead of a statewide CoL you used, say, county CoL based on residence and then aggregated the statewide numbers.

But using this or other statewide CoL-based metrics does get at something that mean or median income or measuring against the even less relevant national poverty line does not.

Interesting and good points. Thanks!

Yeah, when it comes to New York, CoL, income, etc. vary widely; Albany, Buffalo, Binghamton, and NYC are all incredibly different. And as far as I know county level CoL isn't so great either, depending on how big your county is; even in New York, Huntington and Riverhead have vastly different local economies (to the point where there are occasionally calls to split Suffolk County in two), to say nothing of massive counties like King County, WA.

That’s true in Virginia too. But in the flip side, most people live in the expensive metro areas.

The chart I posted uses the BEA’s regional price parity figures: https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/methodologies/RPP201...

> It’s like the difference between Belgium and Australia.

Which are almost on opposite sides of the planet, never mind that the one is a very small country and the other is a huge continent.

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