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Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

Yeah let's run the country like Alabama instead. They're doing well! /s

Maybe we should let each state run the way they see fit... you know kind of like how the Constitution assumed things should be done until the Commerce Clause was used by the Federal Government to hammer every state into submission.

States love independence until their power grid fails or they get hit by a hurricane or an international pandemic.

And states love the federal government until they can't get the legislative buy in to enact their pet policies.

There's no free lunch.

Alabama has a higher GDP per capita than Germany, Belgium, Israel, France, Japan, the U.K. and...I could go on.

Alabama is doing well. We live in such an enormously wealthy country that it only looks bad by comparison. But not by comparison to basically anywhere else on Earth.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_U.S._states...

GDP is, unfortunately, a flawed metric. Or at least an incomplete one.

I greatly doubt the average German, Belgian, Japanese, etc. would want to live in Alabama :-)

Edit:

Another flawed metric, but probably closer to the truth, tells a slightly different story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Alabama has roughly the same HDI as Cyprus. Cyprus is a nice place, but it's quite a bit behind the countries on your list.

If we try to use the inequality adjusted HDI (which depending on how you look at it, might get us closer to the real situation - or might not), things look even worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequalit...

I can't find the number of Alabama, but considering that it's generally in one of the last places in the US, I can't imagine it being higher than the US average, so I wouldn't be shocked to see it somewhere around Croatia's level.

You realized you just dismissed GDP per capita, a quantitative metric, as too “flawed”, then instead relied on HDI which entirely a made up metric based on subjective measures?

Yes, because money isn't everything. I know (you seem to be American) that this is probably a strange concept :-p

And HDI is still quantitative, it's still a number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#New_me...

You might not like the magic numbers in the formula or the things they choose to weigh, but GDP is much, much too coarse to evaluate anything about the greater well-being of a population, especially in developed countries.

It’s a really terrible index if you’ve ever dig into the criticisms. It’s doesn’t do a very good job of measuring the things it claims to measure.

So you’ve basically argued against a quantifiable measure that is a major determinant of quality of life and replaced it with something worse?

>Yes, because money isn't everything.

That's the exact same argument people in net tax recipient states use for reducing federal taxation even when it hurts them slightly.

In the very least you'd have to adjust for purchasing power parity and look at the median rather than the mean, to say anything useful about quality of life for normal people.

Yes, I agree. GDP is a very rough measure. I'd prefer PPP, but I couldn't find it for individual states after a cursory search. (I still think most readers will be surprised by Alabama's GDP, relative to wealthy European nations, so it's not totally useless.)

It’s GDP not income so not sure what the median would do since that would ignore any distribution through taxes.

Agreed, PPP would be better, but my cursory search didn't turn up a convenient list like the one I linked for GDP. (This is a bit like the old joke about a guy searching for his keys 20 feet from where he dropped them, because that's where the streetlight is.)

Hahahaha no, Alabama is not doing well...at anything.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/quality-of-...

In response to my claim that Alabama only looks bad by comparison to other U.S. states because of how rich the U.S. is, but that it's in fact a very wealthy place by comparison to everywhere else -- in response to this you offered...a ranking of U.S. states?

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