But I am taking issue with the slant that the article put on their article
I don't see slant at play here. It looked to me like a straightforward description of those pockets of the country that are experiencing the strongest economic growth. Do you think there's a cabal of writers at Newsweek that are twisting data to make Texas and Utah look great? What would the point of it be?
But I did take issue with that slant. Here, for example, are lists of states by median and per capita income. The top spots are dominated by blue states, the bottom spots are dominated by red states:
You look at this in an effort to demean red states. I look at this as a partial explanation for why business growth and expansion is occuring disporportionately in those red state pockets, i.e. the cost of labor is less.
The top states are dominated by blue states, the bottom by red states. Not that any one list actually means very much,
Lists like the one you gave don't mean much if you only look at the aggregate numbers. This one used twenty variables to produce the final list, thus it pays to look at the variables themselves. For example: Vermont is at the top of the pack while Utah is toward the bottom. Yet Utah has a slightly higher percentage of high school graduates, in fact the highest of any state. It also is almost even with Vermont in terms of percentage of residents with bachelors degrees....Utah with 31% and Vermont with 32%. So why is Utah toward the bottom? Most likely it comes from these two variables: classroom size and per pupil expenditure. The pupil/teacher ratio in Vermont is given as 11.3, whereas in Utah it is twice that....22.4. Utah also has a smaller per pupil expenditure amount than does Vermont.
When you mix all these variables together, you come up with Vermont on top and Utah way down the pack. But does it actually mean anything or have real merit? Not much. What I draw from it is that Vermont puts in alot more money and teachers than Utah does to get the same results.
Perhaps you're just seeing more implications from the article than are there. Te facts are, and this article supports this, that, in the aggregate, business formation and growth has shifted to red states for the last decade or more. My assumption is that it can be explained primarily in terms of relative costs. Income, sales, and property tax costs. Housing and general building costs. And labor costs. Maybe it's most easily explained as blue states have priced themselves out of the market, so to speak. |
