4 ms·

It doesn't matter to conservatives. Look at the US South. They have been poor for generations because they dislike diversity more than they want a strong econom

• hollerith 10mo ago
  Huh? The US South is wealthier than any country on earth that is not a tax haven excepting only the US as a whole and perhaps Norway with its oil wealth. (The US South was considerably poorer than the rest of the US, but the advent of air conditioning about 75 years ago eventually ended that.) I'm going to guess that it also has more college graduates per capita than any country except the US as a whole. Also, US states and US regions have almost no control over how diverse they are: the Federal government decides who to let into the country, then those people are free to chose which state to live in regardless of how much the residents of a state dislike immigrants.
  • galleywest200 10mo ago
    Compared to New York City, an extremely diverse place?
  • quietsegfault 10mo ago
    You don’t compare a US region to sovereign countries that don’t share federal transfers, monetary policy, or capital markets. The correct comparison might be the South vs other US regions. In that comparison the South has persistently lower incomes, higher poverty, worse health outcomes, and weaker mobility. And while immigration is federal, states clearly influence who stays through jobs, education, civil rights enforcement, and political climate.
    • hollerith 10mo ago
      The Federal government has famously been involved in how well states enforce civil rights starting in the 1950s. Also, the Southern US can't be doing that badly at guarding civil rights if a non-white immigrant can write, >As a brown guy I'd prefer my odds in the reddest county in Mississippi than anywhere in Asia (other than my own ethnostate). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227980
      • quietsegfault 10mo ago
        That isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Saying “China is safer than Mississippi” depends entirely on defining safety as low visible street crime and ignoring state power. China is safer only for people who are compliant, apolitical, unorganized, and unremarkable. For a disadvantaged person, the main risk is not random crime. In China there is no independent court, no reliable legal recourse, no protected media scrutiny, and no guaranteed exit. When something goes wrong, it cannot be challenged. Mississippi has real and serious problems, but the state is constrained by federal courts, national law, public reporting, and internal mobility. Those constraints materially change the risk profile when abuse occurs. Low street crime under an unconstrained government is not “safety.” It is conditional calm. Treating that as “safer” than a place with enforceable limits on state power misunderstands what actually puts disadvantaged people at risk.
        • Herring 10mo ago
          The US South makes an art form out of institutional racism. Challenging isn't working - issues of poverty, health, education, etc are getting worse, not better. The median wealth of white households is now 10x higher than the median wealth of black households. In 1992, the multiple was 7x. These are issues of life and death, and the hostile state is clearly not that constrained. See what happened to Roe v Wade. In China however, living standards are quickly catching up to the US. Average life expectancy has already caught up. See here https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart Fit 2 lines on that data and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far off. I suspect most of the tier 1 Chinese cities are already on par. I get what you're saying and actually I don't entirely disagree. But in a lot of very practical ways the US already doesn't have democracy or rule of law.
  • kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
    > US states and US regions have almost no control over how diverse they are I have an expanding blacklist of states I won't live in because of their broken policies. If you don't support freedom and liberty, you're not a welcome place for civic-minded Americans who can think past their nose. The states very much can control their appeal to outsiders but the demagogues that get elected don't care. There is a collective mind disease that has infected governance since the Gingrich era. This leads to a self-sorting effect where people who have the means to leave go elsewhere. I grew up in Arkansas and not speaking as an ignorant outsider. I have no interest in living there because of the broad cultural problems and lack of work opportunity.
    • hollerith 10mo ago
      OK, but the relevance of your comment to the comment I was replying to is unclear to me unless you are an immigrant into the US.
  • HAL3000 10mo ago
    I think your entire analysis is based more on a hunch than on data. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_... US is 9th, so the south alone would rank even lower.
  • analog31 10mo ago
    A continual point of debate is whether the front-page economic indicators tell the whole story about the welfare of the population. The US lags behind many countries in areas such as life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, health care, suicide, motor vehicle deaths, violent crime, and so forth. We have lots of money, but our money doesn't seem to buy us as much quality of life. I say these things, though I'm doing OK money wise and have an otherwise decent lifestyle. The disparity between the big indicators and the lives of the people is in fact a source of political contention. In 2024, people were angry in a "growing" economy that seemed to have gotten inflation and unemployment under control.
  • atmavatar 10mo ago
    Is that before or after accounting for all the federal money it receives? The red states are the welfare queens of the union, with nearly all of them taking in more federal money than they return in tax revenue.
• hollywood_court 10mo ago
  The South is a bit of a lost cause. I was born and raised in Alabama. I spent many years out of the country and also living elsewhere in the US. But I've been back in Alabama since October 2010. These people here love to shoot themselves in the foot. I always say that Sherman should have never stopped. He should have burnt everything to the ground.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• trgn 10mo ago
  > They have been poor for generations that will be news to a lot of people in the south.
  • dyauspitr 10mo ago
    Stats > anecdotes
    • kontopi 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      • stefanfisk 10mo ago
        Which countries would that be specifically?
      • dyauspitr 10mo ago
        Many many Americans find it impossible to support companies led by a Nazi. Personal safety > American nationalism
  • sonotathrowaway 10mo ago
    One of the implications of having the worst education in the nation is that a lot of facts would surprise them.
• stuffn 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • bryanlarsen 10mo ago
    None of the above is in https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...