Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It may be tempting to dismiss the problems plaguing this region as being self-inflicted, a mere product of backward ways and a collective refusal to catch up. These problems, however, are infinitely more complex than that. Countless politicians at every level of government have tried to find a solution.[0] In the end, they all failed.
It occurs to me as I type this that I don't have a precise thesis for my comment, other than to say this: It is not easy. If it were easy to fix, we would have.
It would not surprise me if the easiest places to live have identical demographics and characteristics as the hardest places to live. The correlation might be dual, but the causation is near impossible to identify.
Edit: long term memory fail.
I gather you haven't travelled much. The difference between poor scoring places (pick a town in Kentucky) and high scoring ones (Seattle for example) is absolutely huge. Almost to the point of feeling like being in a different country.
I think a big part of the problem is that the article explicitly uses "demographics and characteristics" to determine difficulty of living, so the above statement is false by definition. I think you do make a good point though, unfortunately, I'm not sure how to phrase it any better.
Neoliberalism and individualism are too popular(ly convenient) in this country, so much so that even if you had
> a precise [and uniquely substantiated] thesis for [your] comment
, we would have found a clipart way to dismiss it using the very perspectives you said are uninformed.
You can lead a horse to water...
As long as people insist on believing that the earth is 6000 years old, that lowering taxes on rich people is going to make their own lives better, and that the best way to preserve freedom and peace is unfettered access to firearms, there is only so much you can do for them. At the end of the day you simply can't help someone who steadfastly refuses to help themselves.
I'm always amazed at the folks who are "open-minded" and at the same time feel a need to "correct" anyone who doesn't think the same way they do.
What is the harm if folks have different beliefs than you?
I don't think that pointing this out is in any way disrespectful.
When policy is enacted based on votes from the uneducated that flies in the face of science.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Facts are ground in reason, evidence, and proof, and therefore not up for debate.
(Oh, and BTW, I was born in Germany. I have been to over seventy countries. I grew up in Tennessee, and went to college in rural Virginia, and spent two years hanging out with homeless people in LA. So I'm pretty sure my "narrow mindset" is not due to not having seen enough of the world.)
The northern suburbs of Atlanta qualify, for one area. High on the fundamentalist Christian scale, higher on the gun ownership scale, and extremely high on the lower taxes scale. And all doing well on this chart, many in the top 10%.
Large swaths of the west would qualify as well.
I'm really curious to hear how your explanation for how belief in gun ownership causes people to be trapped in poverty.
But I probably shouldn't have cited this as an example because it's too politically charged. What causes people to be trapped in poverty is doggedly clinging to beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence that those beliefs are false. That is a personality trait that prevents people from solving problems, so it is no surprise that in places where most people have this personality trait, problems tend to go unsolved.
If you showed a climate change believer opposing evidence, they'd discount it; if you showed a climate change denier opposing evidence, they too would discount the evidence.
Because that's even more generally wrong that what you initially stated.
I also believe that, all else being equal, an individual more likely to succeed if they don't cling to false beliefs, but that's not what is under discussion here. But if you want to discuss that, there are two important things to keep in mind:
1. All else is never equal. Societal conformance is very important to success, so in a society where clinging to false beliefs is considered a virtue, an individual may well do better by doing so.
2. Individual outcomes have a very high variance, i.e. they are due as much or more to luck as a person's choices. So in a population of millions you will always be able to find individuals who were successful despite doing all the wrong things (and vice versa by the way).
All I can say at this point is that your theory is definitely in conflict with my observations of the world. So much so that I see the theory as wishful thinking about how things ought to work than how they actually do.
So let me try this again: no, I am not saying that "successful people don't cling to beliefs that have a lot of evidence against them". I am saying that a society that considers it virtuous to maintain beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is going to be less effective at solving problems than a society that does not consider it a virtue, and so problems will tend to go unsolved more than if the society did not consider this a virtue.
What observations of the world have you made that contradict this?
I think for some people the way they presently live is the only way they know to live and so can't fathom a way to impart anything different in their children to overcome the difficulties. In other words, they're in a vicious cycle of their own culture. Religion, views on firearms, etc. have little to do with how well they do in life. It's more their culture --their way of life which they cannot escape.
That depends on what you mean by "literally". I don't think it's possible to be a young-earth creationist and still believe in education and progress. The cognitive dissonance is just too great.
But my comment was not really so much about religion per se as considering it a virtue to cling to beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That applies to political as well as religious beliefs.
> they're in a vicious cycle of their own culture
Exactly right.
Religion and politics are just a distraction in discussing their issues. The south used to be Democratic --I think it flipped Republican in the 1970s. So, really, politics and religious injection into their situation just distracts from the mindset which holds those people down.
That's right. And why did it flip? It's because Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act, and Republicans under Richard Nixon's leadership very cynically seized on the South's entrenched racism in order to capture power. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
Kansas used to be Democratic too. If flipped after Roe v. Wade, and they are only now starting to pay the economic price. There are many other examples, but Kansas is the most obvious. I don't have a reference handy, just Google for "Kansas economy". Things are worse in Appalachia because this has been going since before the Civil War.
I have spent more than half my life being an evangelical christian where this was the dominant beliefs. Our youth leader was successful in the fashion industry, our 'worship' leader was a top-level manager at a big bank, and our members included quite a few realtors, the owner of one of the largest jewelry stores, and one of the elders (the non-paid pastors) was a high-level mathematician. I think he even won a prize once for solving some problem.
I'm not saying that there is no correlation between education level or intelligence and 'crazy fundamental religious beliefs', but your statement is just wrong.
If there's one thing I learned from my religious background, it's that humans have an amazing capacity to believe crazy things and be highly skilled, educated and intelligent. I often try to remind myself of this whenever I'm too certain of something, because if I could've been so utterly wrong once, how big are the chances that I could be incredibly wrong again?
And perhaps my mistakes are more subtle and harder to figure out now precisely because I find myself in the majority these days.
That is certainly possible. I don't know any YECs personally (thought I know a few ex-YECs) so all my opinions about them are based on what I've read. But I've read a lot, including a lot of YEC literature, because I do think it's important to understand the opposing point of view. (In fact, if you know any YECs who are open to discussion their beliefs I would be very grateful for an introduction.)
I will also say this: individual success has a very high variance, so in a large enough population you will always be able to find outliers. Notwithstanding, I don't find your counterexamples very convincing. Being successful in the fashion industry or the jewelry industry, or even in banking, doesn't actually require a lot of problem-solving skills. Quite the opposite: the requisite skills in those industries are empathy and a willingness to conform to societal norms.
A YEC mathematician would certainly be an interesting data point, but such a person would definitely be an outlier. If such people actually exist, I would truly welcome an opportunity to have a chat with one.
I do believe there's an inverse correlation between education level and intelligence on the one hand, and fundamentalist beliefs on the other. Whether they're outliers or not is another question, but I think you might be surprised how many of them there are.
Not saying it isn't a complex problem, but you're not exactly helping to enrich the area and stem the likely brain drain. And, I am not judging you or others like you. It's completely rational to avoid suffering and seek out an environment where you can thrive.
Diffusing positive cultural influencers instead of hoarding them in cities or places like SV would probably help. But, I really doubt that's a practical solution. It may just be that we need to build out from the bright spots rather than spread ourselves too thin with a sweeping social experiment. We may be stuck with deserts of backwardness for a while.
"State choice" and urban migration strikes me as similar (albeit with a slower generational period) to school choice. Some areas will attract more "good" students and teachers while others will slouch and drag behind in a fractal failure. How far are we obligated to go? Similar questions came up in the wake of Katrina. Personally, I think replacing vicious cycles with virtuous ones will almost always be a good investment.
So I just read this PBS author interview which tries to put some reasons to it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings...
The main takeaway, as I read it, is that in cities and other rural areas there is a middle class and even some upper class folks around and the resources they bring along (and maybe even the example they set... sorry if that's offensive) is a positive influence on the extremely poor. In cities, obviously you have better municipal services and programs and a professional class of doctors, lawyers, etc. In rural farmland many families own their land which has some value and there are some wealthy landowners with large tracts sprinkled in.
In Appalachia, there's none of that. The land isn't worth anything and it's just poor poor poor as far as the eye can see (which is large, geographically, unlike inner cities).
Except for coal mine owners and operators. That, I can't explain. Do they live in the area? Do they not contribute to the communities? The PBS article goes as far as to say they actively held the poor down to keep them working in the mines, but I'd have to see more evidence to believe that wholesale.
In any case, it strikes me that this wasteland of poverty with very few middle class or wealthy folks is the opposite effect of tech hubs. Brad Feld and others have written about how the density of entrepreneurs and angel investors with deep pockets is what makes a tech hub viable (very liberally paraphrased). From a general perspective, it seems like a normal curve where the outliers at the top are places most uniformly non-poor and populated densely and the outliers at the bottom are uniformly poor and populated sparsely.
For the people who work in the mines, they make more money, but they honestly don't really know what to do with it...and there's nothing in particular to spend it on locally anyway.
Even worse, arable land is a rarity, it is a mountain area! So it's hard to even build a local agricultural economy. It's isolated from transport links, landlocked and hard to navigate. If you pick a route from anywhere East of Appalachia, and take it to San Francisco or L.A., you'll be routed entirely around the area in favor of a Northern or Southern route.
I didn't grow up in Appalachia, but I grew up in an area not too different from it. Honestly, if we hadn't been within commuting distance of a major city, my career options would have been farm work or gas station attendant. There wasn't even enough of a commercial sector for "retail clerk" to make the list.
It's a useful thing to drive through that area: it's stunningly beautiful, but you start to get a feel for why there's so little going on there.
But really, mountainous areas just can't support that many people, so they shouldn't be that populated anyways.
> Even worse, arable land is a rarity, it is a mountain area!
In Asia they terrace a lot. Not sure if that is a good idea though, and definitely not necessary in the states where there is plenty of good agriculture land (much of China is mountainous, so it is necessary).
It's a shame, there's a kernel of some great culture there, a unique dialect, great music, entertaining local history and color, some beautiful folk art.
Local dialect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU
The traditional music is a descendant of Celtic folk music, but unique enough to be interesting.
Here's a fantastic documentary on the music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXh8SDp0H-E
All it would really take would be for some kind of Appalachian Music to become wildly popular and I could see the region getting popular music centers people would come to visit. Their main possible export market is all cultural.
[0] www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
But for serious, as we see urbanization pick up, the rural areas are going to continue their downward slide. And as the trend toward suburbanization has reversed we're going to see the suburbs become the new "burnt out inner city"—because inner city is no longer synonymous with poverty and crime.
There has been a broader migration away from rural areas but I also know lots of people who work remotely from more or less rural locales and, at least in principle, that should become more practical rather than less.
It's just not economically rational, in the US at least, for everyone who is upwardly mobile to pack themselves into a handful of desirable cities.
To some extent I think this analysis is plagued by law of small numbers. It seems like the ranking is highly influenced by the fraction of disabled people but there's a lot of quantization noise in that figure, especially when a county like Teton County, Wyoming contains only 22000 people. I think the same thing is probably happening in rural eastern California, for instance in Mono County (pop 14000).
http://giannini.ucop.edu/media/are-update/files/articles/V15...
Every basket of measures is imperfect and I quite like the ones used here (education, income, unemployment, disability, life expectancy and obesity), but there probably are some weird biases someplace.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/06/140056904/the-top-secret-ameri...
But the last time I visited Loudon, it was freaking amazing. Instead of seeing rural farms, my road trip consisted of driving past mansion after mansion. Talking to some folks at the local supermarket, the county is having a heckuva time trying to coordinate all the new growth.
It's federal contracts. You can't borrow and spend the amount the government has over the last ten years or so without the management and prime vendor layer skimming off a tremendous amount of cash. These aren't necessarily folks putting in the commute to do the 9-5 every day. More likely they'll have a hired car, or come into the city and stay at a nice hotel (or an apartment rented for just this purpose)
Loudon is a really interesting experiment in growth and unintended consequences. I'd love to come back in 20-30 years and read a study of the inside game of everything that's going on there. Must be weird to have a PTA meeting with out-of-town, newly minted multimillionaires sitting next to minimum wage folks who grew up there.
The Federal government is also an absolutely absurdly large employer and the pay is reasonable.
I'm from North Dakota, and I've never felt so alone in the world as driving through Wyoming on my way to Denver.
[0] http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/guyrt.github.io/notebooks/Co...
Also, lots of ranches. These are usually run off someone's personal taxes, so high income and high deductions/expenses. $500k/yr income isn't that great when you need to spend millions every decade and high annual operating expenses too. A lot of ranching or timber is about early capex leading to income down the line.
Ski stuff.
Something to note: Wyoming doesn't shield either traditional or Roth IRAs (although ERISA-protected assets like 401ks are) from creditors, unlike other no-income tax states such as Texas and Florida.
Which passage in the Bible tells Christians to shun higher education?
- He/She never said that any biblical passage tells Christians to shun higher education. Nice straw man.
He/She said "many in this area continue to shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible." But, since you are asking the question, lets look at an answer:
- How about all of the passages justifying rape/slavery/violence in the Old Testament? All of these, while not outright shunning higher education, do so implicitly. Just one example among many:
"However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way." (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)
Something else to look at - "Anti-intellectualism in American Life" (Richard Hofstadter). A great book. His tale begins with itinerant Baptist ministers traveling through the bible belt, denouncing those "New England intellectuals". Anti-Intellectualism and organized American religion in the South are very good and old friends.
Actually, the most interesting result is that Los Angeles county, which with ~10M people is the most populous in the U.S., is not closer to the middle than it is.
It's also worth mentioning that those six counties are all contiguous with each other. That's a combined total of over 3 million people. That's far too many to dismiss as simply a statistical outlier.
Further up in Westchester and Rockland you find areas that are really deep in poverty but don't have easy access to reliable public transportation to places where jobs are more easily found.
South Dakota has the "low" spots of Corson, Dewey, and Zieback counties in the central north which corresponds to Standing Rock (crossing the ND border as Siouxland county) and Cheyenne River. Not much in the way of resources and a long history of poor infrastructure.
Buffalo County is the Crow Creek Indian Reservation. You can see the difference between Crow Creek and Lower Brule Reservation (amazing what a difference the other side of the river is and being an exit away from I90).
Shannon and Todd county are Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations. These are probably the two poorest reservations in the area. The alcohol problem has been the overriding factor as well and not developing any businesses of note.
Bennett and Jackson are mostly National Parks and National Wildlife Refuges.
South Dakota also took a hit on the early storm last year that killed tens of thousands of cattle (early storm, started with rain, freezing winds, cattle didn't have winter coats, and were still in the summer pastures).