You'll note that many of the Native American reservations are doing quite well. Native American is not the overriding factor, but poorly run reservation in out of the way place seems to be.
Also in New York City. While Manhattan is ranked #365 out of 3135, the Bronx is ranked 2324, Brooklyn is 1306, Staten Island is 601, Queens is 390, Westchester is 98, and Nassau county is 66. One city (and suburbs) runs the gamut from poverty to extreme wealth.
Isn't that the timeless beauty of NYC? From squalor to splendour in a couple of blocks... the American Dream that you only need a good break to end up on the other side of the divide... the everyday chance of meeting "great people" on the streets... Warhol hiring midnight cowboys... etc etc.
Having grown up in the Bronx, I am actually really grateful. I can tell you some horror stories, but the best part of it was that there was still access to opportunity just an affordable train ride away in Manhattan.
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 I90 corridor (Sioux Falls in the west going to Rapid City in the easy) and the national parks in the west.
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).
I looked at the relationship between education and income when this data first appeared [0]. Counties with low income for their education level were college towns. Counties with high income for their education level were either near NYC or D.C. or were resource extraction areas.
0% state income tax, so if you are rich and have 5 homes, the Wyoming one is a good primary residence.
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.
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.
The western counties are very wealthy with outside money and have a booming tourist industry with the ski resort and Grand Teton and Yellowstone NPs. Elsewhere coal, gas and uranium is booming. Add in the lack of income tax, Cheyenne and Laramie's proximity to the Denver area and the lowest population of any State equates to a 'good time.'
I am from Bell County, Kentucky, ranked 3110 out of 3135 counties. I no longer live there, but my parents do. I was there just yesterday for Thanksgiving.
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.
This report reminds me of a passage in "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. Prestigious foundations such as the Gates Foundation pumped millions (billions?) of dollars into smaller scale education because a report identified that the worst performing schools had large classrooms in poor, rural counties. Much later, a second review of the data revealed that the best primary schools had large classrooms in poor, rural counties. The results were merely statistical outliers caused by small sample data.
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.
> It would not surprise me if the easiest places to live have identical demographics and characteristics as the hardest places to live.
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.
> It would not surprise me if the easiest places to live have identical demographics and characteristics as the hardest places to live.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Countless politicians at every level of government have tried to find a solution.[0] In the end, they all failed.
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.
What a ridiculous comment. So if they don't subscribe to liberal values they deserve their fate? You sounds like lke the rednecks i've met. "Those dumb city folks just don't know any better!"
The problem is not that their beliefs are different. The problem is that in places like rural Kentucky, doggedly clinging to beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is widely considered to be a virtue. That is not an attitude that is conducive to problem-solving, and so, unsurprisingly, problems tend to go unsolved.
I don't think that pointing this out is in any way disrespectful.
You really should travel a bit more, it might help getting out of that very narrow mindset. There are plenty of places with precisely those beliefs that are doing quite well.
Really? Can you give me a few examples of places where people overwhelmingly subscribe to young-earth creationism that are going "quite well"?
(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.)
If you've been around that much, you really don't have much of an excuse for such a ridiculous position.
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.
I didn't say that "belief in gun ownership causes people to be trapped in poverty." What I said was that belief that "the best way to preserve freedom and peace is unfettered access to firearms" 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.
It's not a personality trait --it's something called belief perseverance. People tend to hold on to their beliefs more irrationally as more available evidence shows the opposite view. You see this in conspiracy theories, climate change, etc.
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.
Not "identical personality traits" plural, one common personality trait, singular. And it's not everyone, merely enough to keep effective problem solvers out of government.
No, that is not what I'm saying (please stop putting words in my mouth and raising straw-man arguments). I'm saying that clinging to false beliefs is not conducive to problem solving, and so if a society considers it virtuous to cling to false beliefs, problems will tend to go unsolved. It may well be that clinging to false beliefs has other societal benefits, but IMHO those are outweighed by the cost.
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).
I'm not raising strawmen, I'm asking you things that quite logically follow from your statements.
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.
My apologies, I misread what you wrote as a statement rather than a question (I swapped the words "you" and "are". Maybe I'm developing late-onset dyslexia.)
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 don't think it's not so much that. I think it's more culture driven than anything else. You can take religion literally, but still believe in education and progress, etc.
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.
> You can take religion literally, but still believe in education and progress, etc.
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.
What I meant by that is whatever they believe "If I don't find a job, I can go ahuntin'" I don't need college, my uncle promised me a job cuttin' weeds, why do I need to learn maths? I ain't never gonna need no trig cuttin' weeds. It's more the thinking for today rather than long term, which is the cultural issue.
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.
> The south used to be Democratic --I think it flipped Republican in the 1970s.
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:
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 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.
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 was merely giving a counter-point to your statement that it's not possible to be a young-earth creationist and still believe in education and progress. Clearly, it's possible, and common enough that I have known personally a large number of very highly educated individuals that are YEC, or have similar beliefs (demons, exorcisms, etc.).
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.
Urbanization. The trend is continuing and is going to continue and as it does the rural areas of the country are going to see more and more resources drain to urban centers. Eventually the rural population will be entirely composed of maniac bandits driving burnt out plymouth dusters with mounted machine gun turrets and terrified hill people raising rabbits for food in their back yards.
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.
Wholeheartedly agree about the urbanization trend, but if you look at that data, that whole section of the Plains states and central US that is 'Doing Better' is in large part rural. My county is 'Randall' in the Texas panhandle, we rank 133 on the list. The metropolitan area (if you call it that) is > 250K. My wife and I are highly educated and we live well above the county and national median income level. Quality of life is good and cost of living is low. I'd say some rural areas are doing things right, the oil boom has a lot to do with that.
I assume you realize that even your second paragraph is a gross exaggeration. Desirable cities also have desirable suburbs and exurbs and there's little in property price trends to suggest that's changing. Lots of people seem to assume that anyone who could afford to would live in San Francisco or New York given the choice but that's simply not true.
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.
I'm not sure this forecast is based on the data in this article. Rural land is actually ridiculously valuable and increasing in value rapidly. I passed up an opportunity to buy some prime farmland in 2008 at what I considered an exorbitant price. The same land today is worth triple. Anyway there's a bunch of very empty, very rural counties in the top decile of this analysis. Just look at Iowa where there are lots of top counties including Story County. Then look at Wyoming which looks really good in this analysis.
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).
Define valuable. I live in Northern Virginia, where a good acre of land can cost a million dollars. Yet, I can drive 3.5 hours and get to land that's worth under $1,000 an acre.
Which is currently driven up in price by cheap money that has nowhere else to go for safe yields (after the stock collapse in '00 and the real estate collapse of '08).
There may be a bias in the scale making the rural-city divide look worse than it is. Rural areas are often cheaper, so the median income could represent more purchasing power. Also a bachelor’s degree here is used as an indicator/measure. In some places these are less valued and relevant to employment as others.
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.
Why is Loudoun County, Virginia so prosperous? It has a median household income of $122,000, but I don't see any meaningful employers in the area, and it's a large population of around 350,000 people.
That's Northern VA where tons of tech companies are and was the veritable center of the internet before Silicon Valley. (AOL is or was headquartered in Dulles which is in Loudoun County). It still houses a massive amount of technology companies, data centers, etc.
It's a DC suburb. The usual DC set plus the Dulles tech corridor set. Also, northern VA suburbs are really aggressive about keeping out lower-income people (poor social services, poor transportation), which keeps the average high. The suburbs here don't have really rich people the way you see around other major cities, just very homogenous upper middle class ones.
I grew up in the county. The reason it's so well off is the proximity to dc and large tech/defense corridor. The county attracts the rich because you can buy a McMansion with land, and still get to work. It's built up heavily in the last thirty years (I passed cow pastures and corn fields on the way to school), but they're mostly gone now.
Loudon County, Virginia is a very similar county to the Virginia County I live in. The geography is the same, the politics is (was) the same, the laws and societal structures are almost identical.
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 267 toll-road is the main artery for an absolutely massive defense-tech industry. It's a huge ecosystem with companies from 1 person to 100,000. Even though the mechanisms are largely the same, these small-companies-destined-to-be-bought-out-by-big-companies aren't really called "startups" and aren't thought of in quite the same way. The education level in the county is also obscenely high compared to elsewhere in the U.S.
The Federal government is also an absolutely absurdly large employer and the pay is reasonable.
i was in arkansas last week for my father's passing. i've been writing about his life as a way to cope, and my trip was a stark reminder of the marginal lives of the working poor in this country. mind you, these are not people asking for a handout or who see themselves as poor. but their 40 hours of work (if they can get it) certainly provides much less for their families. they have jobs implicated in all sorts of health problems that are barely being managed by a mediocre health system. they worry about foreclosure and repossession and deal with payday lenders and pawn shops. phones and other utilities get cut off for non-payment and they're charged fees they can't afford to reinstate service. they're not unhappy so much as they have much harder lives than those of us in the professional ranks. it's simply not fair.
These results need to be taken with a big ol' hunk o' salt. The outliers are all teeny tiny counties. #1 ranked Los Alamos county has only 17,000 residents, and last-place Clay county has 21,000. The bigger the county, the more likely it is to simply regress to the mean.
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.
That doesn't appear to be accurate. #3 Fairfax County, VA and #9 Montgomery County, MD both have over a million people which puts them in the top 50 counties in the US by population. The others are smaller, but many are still much larger than Los Alamos. #4 Loudoun County, VA has 350,000, #6 Howard County, MD has 290,000, #2 Arlington County, VA has 227,000 and #7 Alexandria City, VA has 140,000.
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.
I'm not saying that these results are completely invalid, just that they can't simply be taken at face value. You have to take things like population into account when interpreting the data.
The bible belt continues to have some of the worst (or hardest) places to live in US. If find this very interesting, as many in this area continue to shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible.
> 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.
I guess "hard" is subjective. I was guessing the hardest place might be rural Alaska where you have no electric power or water unless you provide it yourself, and you have to spend most of the short summer cutting firewood so you don't freeze to death over the winter, and growing vegetables, fishing, and hunting so you don't starve.
I'm from Lexington, KY, the blue dot in a sea of orange on the map. You hear a lot about Appalachia's woes (the stories on the local news from Bell County, Bath County, etc are depressing beyond words), but it's been hard for me to understand why Appalachia is the way it is: chronically, horribly and uniformly poverty stricken.
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.
It's a bad cycle. Imagine you're the "wealthy" person in a town of poor, jobless people. What local businesses do you spend you time and money in? Groceries and gas? Both are probably not locally owned, so most of what you spend leaves the area. You drive 2 hours on weekends to get to the nearest Walmart to buy clothes, so again most of your money leaves the area: and none of the places you're spending at employee lots of people and/or pay them lots of money. Most of the jobs servicing those industries will be part-time anyways.
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.
Tourism might work, the area is plenty beautiful. Of course, those jobs aren't really that great. Most cities in mountainous regions are built in valleys for that reason.
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).
There is, lots of ski resorts, hiking, that sort of thing. The kicker is that those same places will actually hire in lots of Europeans to work the facilities, so not only are the employees not local, they aren't even from the same country!
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.
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.
My dad, as part of his economic development work, is actually moving on this right now. His folks did some research and found that despite the vast natural beauty of eastern Kentucky and its geographically central location, there isn't a single venue in a 100 mile radius that would be suitable for a corporate retreat or convention. So that's what they're focusing on. I can't say much more about it at this point as I don't think the details are public yet, but things are definitely happening.
If you're looking for some insights into why it's like that, you should make some time to read American Nations [0]. It connects a lot of dots. Probably the best book I read/listened to last year.
When you compare it to this dot map which shows population density you can see a relation to high density in rural areas to the worse areas on the other map. http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadFurther 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).
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.
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.
[0] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9518
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/