Honestly, it probably is the weather. A better climate for growing cash crops led to an economy based on slavery and agriculture, which isn't nearly as productive as one based on industry. 200 years later, the effects are still felt - although the differences in income are much less stark than they would have been 50 years ago.
The scientific literature is still divided on this issue. Climate- or geography-based explanations typically ignore the role of institutions (like property rights regimes, market institutions, and so on), although the two are ultimately difficult to separate from each other. This paper by Sokoloff and Engerman provides a nuanced overview of the debate: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.14.3.217
One should also consider that due to the South's geography, there is not many powerful rivers (within the interior) that can be used to power the factories or encourage maritime trade with the Caribbean, thus the South could have never grow urban centers like the North. Along with this, those cash crops effectively made the South rely on an agrarian economy in which the only sort of industrialization reaching it would be tools to increase farming output. Even after the Civil War during Reconstruction, although many textile factories did move down South, the region still lagged behind the more robust North, as the newly industrialized economy has to compete with an established dominating competitor. These are only a few factors in which why those states in the South lag behind in those income, as a lack of industrialization/reliance on an agrarian economy can not be a dominate force in an economy based on service/industry, in which the South is still playing catch-up to this day.
@supermusic Perhaps you didn't read the argument. One giant river doesn't propel textile mills like the smaller rivers found everywhere in New England and the Northeast.
Pretty common phenomenon across world history...Economies and civilisations were more "developed" across temperate zones pre the industrial revolution and the age of European colonisation
There's also a correlation in cost of living. You can make 50K in Arkansas and live quite comfortably, or you can make 50K in California and live in poverty. A major driving force for household income is cost of living in that area. The real cause is likely a combination of all of the things in these comments, but with industry comes greed in most cases. Greed in industry and corporations results in higher cost of living, so they are forced to pay higher wages as well. Higher household income doesn't necessarily equate to higher quality of living when comparing states to other states.
90% overlap with Republican states. Since the GOAL of the Republican party is SQUALOR and a desperate, over the barrel workforce that can't make living WAGE DEMANDS. CHEAP LABOR = corporate PROFIT.
And you're talking about mainly the white voters, who make up a slim majority in many of these states. The South is a richer portrait than your assumption.
Most republicans in these states live quite well. Many democrats do too. The cost of living is just different than other urban areas and northern states. The poorest people in these states are actually democrats in the inner cities with no education or poor rural people, but most republican voters are gainfully employed or own businesses, and still want less govt interference in their lives/beliefs. There are beautiful homes and cities everywhere in these states.
It probably goes back to the early days of the nation - industrial north vs agricultural south - and add the limited crops of the south, labor-intensive (rice, cotton, tobacco).
At least he shows what Democrats really think of the poor. In liberal major cities around the country, crime is rampant and the poor live in horrible conditions. Yet the suburbs are usually Republican and prosperous.
I didn't see him making a comment about the poor in general. He made a comment about the overlap between red states and poverty. That is not a commentary on poverty and poor people in general.
Oh yay, and Roxy pointed out that whole "those poor inner city blacks!" Republican pronouncement. Also, I'm not sure what suburbs she lives in, unless it's the southern cities'.
Do you really have to bring that up in a quiz not even related to the quiz topic? The quiz is "Poorest US States" yet we have a comment of how most of these states are Republican.
It's interesting that most of these states were Democrat when I was young. (1960s) And they were also the poorest then, too. I suspect it has more to do with the fact that there was less manufacturing in those states and therefore less income. Agricultural jobs don't pay as well. Manufacturing was beginning to move to the south where they were right-to-work states with fewer labor unions, but then NAFTA changed that, too.
The Republican and Democratic parties as we know them today didn't really take shape until the late 60s/70s anyway- that's why looking back farther than that you see some things that by what we know today seems counter-intuitive.
Inflation is much higher in some Northern and Western states, such as New York and California, so their median household income is much higher, yet the cost of goods around them is also much higher.
They are more poor because of various factors such as location and population. Alaska, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming are very republican states, but they don't have low median household incomes. Also, blue states tend to have already had major industrialization for most of our nation's history, which helps with the wealth of those areas.
I think it's worth bringing up economic inequality and urbanization when looking at this. Most of these states are mostly rural and lack large cities, and larger rural populations typically correlation with lower industrialization. Also, a lot of urbanized states like California and New York have higher inequality coefficients than these states (although several of these states are still in the top 10). This is largely because these states have ultra-wealthy people living in the same cities as a lot of working class people. The upper class raise the median income which makes it seem like the states are overall wealthier when in fact they have many poor people still. Democrats do better in urban areas and Republicans in rural areas, so I guess party does factor in as well
One of the few quizzes on the site where it would make sense to use purchasing power parity (many of these states are also among the cheapest US states), but it doesn't.
It does look obvious to an outsider that nearly all the once 'Confederate States' are on the poorest list. The question is 'Why?'. There must be a reason and as I am not from USA I wonder what it is.
The north and coasts have more inflated housing and goods. Somebody making $70k in Baton Rouge, Louisiana will have an equivalent standard of living as somebody making $108k in San Diego, California.
Even using PPP Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, West Virginia and New Mexico rank among the poorest US states, but while what Pork said is still essentially true it doesn't come close to explaining why these states are poor. It's complicated. A big part of it is that the warmer southern states were still largely agrarian, with economies driven by plantation farming, when the northern states were becoming industrialized. Part of it is that the South was left in ruins after the American Civil War, and while the North attempted to rebuild the South through Reconstruction, Southern politicians were more interested in maintaining racial inequities in their states than accepting help rebuilding and so saw Reconstruction as foreign meddling in their affairs. These two factors alone gave the Northern states a huge head start going forward, and can account for most of the discrepancy that exists today. But you could also point to other factors.
For instance the fact that air conditioning and weather proofing weren't invented until the 20th century and before that living in a large city in the American South meant disease and unpleasantness- though New Orleans thrived as a port of trade there were never any Southern cities to rival New York, Boston, Chicago, or Philadelphia. Finally, the Republican party has a death grip on most of these states and has ever since the 1960s when Republican leaders decided to oppose Civil Rights legislation in order to win the favor of Southern racists. It was a very sad turn of events for the party of Lincoln, but it worked, and all of these once solidly-blue states became solidly red. And Republican policies are simply bad for the economy. But I'd say this is the least important factor of all those things I already mentioned. And Pork's point shouldn't be discounted, either. If you look at cost of living then there are more poor people in New York and Hawaii than in any Southern state.
There is no more prevalent myth among liberals than that of the South turning red with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For those seeking the truth, Sean Trende does a very thorough and good analysis here:
It's not a myth. Look at an election map. And quoted from the article: "This is not to say that race didn't play a role - it absolutely did. Nor is it to deny that the Republicans sometimes exploited (and still exploit) racial issues to motivate voters (as do Democrats)" Missed that part?
All that the article seems to point out was that the Democrats' "Solid South" didn't flip overnight, which is obvious, and I've never seen anyone assert anything to the contrary. Of course some people who had voted Democrat their whole lives were reluctant to switch parties. But the change in the patterns of the electoral map could hardly be more stark, sudden, or complete in its transformation.
Also I'm not sure which states Trende is counting as Southern, everything south of the Mason-Dixon line? But it's most useful to look at the plantation/slavery/racism belt... Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina. This is where the "Southern strategy" was meant to pay dividends. Other southern states have always been more swingy. But just look at that block and you can see that 100% of them voted Democrat or Dixiecrat ("State's Rights") every single year from 1880 to 1960... and then starting in 1964 they immediately flip... and virtually go 100% to Republicans (or segregationist George Wallace) every single year, minus 1976 when Democrats ran a Georgian peanut farmer for president (in '80 he was only able to hang on to his home state), and 1992 when Ross Perot split the vote and Democrats ran a good old boy from Arkansas with a Tennessee native for VP (and they still only managed to pick up one state out of the bunch in '92, and none in '96).
Democrats started to lose their hold on Southern racists around 1948, when southern Democrats angry with Truman's increasing support of civil rights splintered off and formed their own racist party, the "States' Rights" party, commonly called the Dixiecrat party. Virtually all of these Dixiecrats including Strom Thurmond their candidate for president eventually became Republicans.
But that wasn't enough to lose the South to Democrats immediately, who after all had much better campaign and political infrastructure established there going back generations. So it's not true that the '64 Civil Rights Act and Nixon's Southern Strategy alone flipped the South, but it finished what already began decades earlier. And it was always about race.
Next you're going to deny that the Civil War was really about Slavery, right?
Final note about West Virginia: it's a coal miner's state. And its industry is dying. This is why it's the only state in the USA where both it's population and GDP have been shrinking. This is a trend that goes back decades and has little to do with Slavery, the Civil War, politics or anything else.
If the question is "why", here is my best guess. The southern states were less industrialized because of their reliance on agriculture and slave labor. This caused them to be much poorer than the northern states, and losing the Civil War made the disparity much worse. Fast forward 150 years and these states are still the poorest. But, if I had to guess, I would say that the gap has narrowed significantly. It would be interesting to see! Maybe I will look for some historical data.
Mississippi and West Virginia are also the two states with the highest obesity rate in the nation if I'm not mistaken. My region in France sits also on top on both stats, and I think there is a correlation between those two statistics in every "developped" country in the world. Precarity tends to bring a lot of ailments with it.
Unfortunately here (and I don't know how it is in France), the cheapest food to buy, calorie-for-calorie, is at fast food restaurants like McDonald's. Combine that with working possibly multiple jobs with no time to cook, and you have people who need to get the most out of their food money, which sadly means crap that will make you both fat and sick. :-(
McDonald's is cheap but definitely more expensive than cooking. Also, in the United States, hours worked per worker has decreased by a lot, and on average, poor people work far fewer hours than the rich. There's definitely something else going on. Food deserts is one theory, but it turns out they don't really matter. Which makes sense as there wouldn't be food deserts in the first place if people wanted to buy healthy food. So, I'd have to guess that cultural transmission of poor eating habits explains it. Which sucks because that's the hardest thing to fix.
The difference is that the governments in those states are actively working to solve those problems rather than ignore (or perpetuate) them so that they can focus on eliminating abortions instead.
In searching around at '10 poorest states in America in 2016' from Benefits Pro, 'America’s Richest (And Poorest) States' from the Huffington Post, 'These Are America’s Richest & Poorest States' from VOA News, state fact-boxes from last years' National Geographic Atlas of the United States, the 'List of U.S. states by income' at Wikipedia, and 'The 10 Poorest States In America' from Business Insider, it seems that North Carolina is a more common occurrence than Montana, although there are well over two dozen others in the top ten as well (thus, more than half of the states). The situation has played out as though the state has fallen in those rankings while jumping up at least five spots, so shouldn't this data be updated for the newest info from 2015 at the original source that the creator provided in September, and to this year's, when it comes out in a few weeks?
Didn't want to pick which political comment thread to put this in, but the correlation between being poor and being Republican is that both reflect an unwillingess to change and modernize. It might be better to characterize these states as conservative rather than Republican-- there are more moderate Republican states that don't have the same issues. What makes these states poor and conservative is that they sit around wanting the world to go back to a concept of yesterday, rather than acknowledging they need to change-- change their economies, change their social viewpoints, change their lifestyles.
Religion is truly "the opiate of the masses". Note that the poorest states have by far the most church goers, gamely suffering through this earthly hell while eagerly awaiting their reward in heaven. And yes, while $70,000 a year may go a lot further in Mississippi than it does in New York or California, how many Mississippians actually earn $70,000/yr?
3 types of lies: Lies, damned lies and statistics. These statistics, like all statistics, can be infinitely refined with "but"... The cost of a home in a "rich" state means your average income is keeping you living in a poverty box. Top 10 "rich" states Maryland and Virginia, full of suburbs leeching from the taxpayers, lie next to the penned in ghetto that supports them. Ever been to Bridgeport or Trenton? They make any part of Mississippi or South Carolina look like a better place to live and raise kids.
Yes, but if you go to most of Connecticut or New Jersey, you'll feel differently, which is probably why this is not "name the states with the poorest cities" quiz. Cities and states are governed differently and subject to different stressors, so your simplistic and facile objection isn't really worth anything.
True. If you look at GDP per capita (in PPP), for example, the UK is poorer than the poorest US state. If you look at median household income not adjusted for PPP, Mississippi's $42k is pretty high. I can't find data for countries by median income (nominal). Adjusted for PPP and looking at median household incomes, New York actually becomes the USA's poorest states, but its $43,200 household income (PPP) makes it wealthier than Canada, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Finland, Japan, Germany, Singapore, Qatar, the UK, etc.
Yep. But actually the UK has a GDP (PPP) per capita of $45,705 (2018), or $43,013 in 2016, which is higher than Mississippi (poorest U.S. state by GDP (PPP) per capita), but lower than the 2nd poorest (West Virginia).
@JackintheBox, this is median household income not GDP by capita. In terms of GDP, every single state in the U.S. is wealthier than the United Kingdom.
Lots of comments on "dumb poor republican states". However, many of the poorest and least industrious people in our states vote democrat. Most republicans are somewhat successful or own businesses here. I would wager that the least industrious are blue voters, and there are huge numbers of minorities here that vote blue. For instance, while blacks account for 13% of the US population, they are more like 50% of the population in many areas of the South. My city in NC is mostly black in town, and most of the schools are very diverse with migrant children, blacks, and whites. This also goes back to the agriculture and slavery economy that is now wiped out in the South, which leaves tons of people that no longer work or produce stuff, and many don't know how to. Keep in mind, I am white and my wife is black, but I wanted to point these facts out.
I don't think people who constantly slam the southern states realize how a large a population of minorities actually live in them. And those minorities tend to be pretty religious.
This quiz was easy, I just started guessing red states. Hopefully they realize they deserve better, and they stop waiting for “trickle down” effect to actually benefit them and their hard work.
Trickle down isn't going to do great things in itself, but I also don't care to attack wealthy people or business owners and try to have the government steal more of their money to run inept schemes and buy dumb voters. Lower taxes for all classes would be best, and we are seeing a decent economy from recent changes, lowering our corporate tax rate(which was stupidly high), and a small tax cut for middle class folks(though not enough). The left's only answer is to call everyone racist and ignorant, while promising to buy everything you ever coveted with other people's labor and money and promise the moon. Many people in red states are actually blue voters, minorities, etc. who actually require programs and reflect low scores and make the South or red states look impoverished. Nearly every republican or libertarian I know in this red state has a productive job or business. It is mostly blue voters here who have burger shop jobs or have babies with no husbands and require programs.
Ah, the key factor is education all the way to College and Advanced Degrees. There is a high correlation between education, poverty and political inclination. See this https://moragueno.wordpress.com/2016/11/12/the-2016-us-presidential-elections-in-3-charts/
It's really weird that you're implying the Democrats ruin wealth when 90% of the states on this list are reliably Republican. I guess poor liberal states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, Washington, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Oregon could really learn a thing or two from the economic powerhouses in the Republican Bible Belt.
The wealth inequality and budgeting of those states can be terrible, though. Most of the poorest people in red states are blue voters with no education, job skills, or family unit.
Living in one of the top three poorest states gives me a different insight. Lack of education and the failure to get past the harms done during slavery are the main issues.
Christ, it always shocks me how incredibly rich Americans are. The "poorest" Americans make more money than my entire family put together back in China.
Proof that incentives, capitalism, free markets, and the American dream DO actually work better than most of the world, so I don't know why people keep seeking to destroy this and replace it with some failed systems from other places.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/09/09/misunderstanding_the_southern_realignment_107084.html
All that the article seems to point out was that the Democrats' "Solid South" didn't flip overnight, which is obvious, and I've never seen anyone assert anything to the contrary. Of course some people who had voted Democrat their whole lives were reluctant to switch parties. But the change in the patterns of the electoral map could hardly be more stark, sudden, or complete in its transformation.
https://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/
But that wasn't enough to lose the South to Democrats immediately, who after all had much better campaign and political infrastructure established there going back generations. So it's not true that the '64 Civil Rights Act and Nixon's Southern Strategy alone flipped the South, but it finished what already began decades earlier. And it was always about race.
Next you're going to deny that the Civil War was really about Slavery, right?