These states are America's worst for quality of life in 2025 | Hacker News Reader

These states are America's worst for quality of life in 2025

cnbc.com

30 pointsKnuthIsGod35 comments

> And the state is doing poorly in meeting their needs. Utah ranks 48th in licensed child care centers per capita

I imagine LDS people probably have stay at home mothers at a vastly higher rate than the general population? If so then this stat says nothing about whether the state is meeting their needs.

Also, Utah was ranked #1, for quality of life, by US News: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings

Something's definitely fishy here. Neither US News nor CNBC have very good methodology, but US News seems to have put a bit more work into finding metrics that directly represent quality of life, instead of just analyzing regulations, and assuming their effects on quality of life.

It’s pretty weird that stories with glaring methodological flaws are just discussed by the public as if they are plausibly correct.

I want a news source that I can trust to vet this sort of thing, but the closest I can get is full of crazed ideologues. But I also don’t want them to call out that it’s wrong. I just want them to pass the information on to me assuming I wouldn’t care to even know that this article exists, why would I care to read what the flaws are, etc

I think putting up with the occasional crazed ideologies is worth it, if it means the rest of the articles acknowledge politicians are usually wrong, regardless of the party. That's why I read articles from the Reason Foundation (https://reason.com/latest/), unless there's something up their alley, like politician legalizing hard drugs for sex workers, or something crazy like that, they have no issue with calling politicians out on their nonsense, regardless of the party.

The next best option is finding a news source that at least has journalists with competing viewpoints. It does mean for every article calling out nonsense, you'll get another one supporting it, but at least they aren't ignoring any issues they find inconvenient. The best I've found for this is The Hill. (https://thehill.com/news/) Sure, one of their contributors took CNBC at their word on the quality of life ranking (https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5402709-vermont-qua...) with no thought put into whether analyzing policy is an effective metric of actual life quality, but they also publish articles from contributors that call out news sources for similar rhetoric.

> I want a news source that I can trust to vet this sort of thing

Then stay away from ranked lists like this. They are national enquirer level news.

There's just no way to boil these topics down to a single number that has any value.

Any model that places Utah among the worst States for quality of life in the US discredits itself. No serious person could arrive at that conclusion. It boggles my mind that anyone would even try to sell that.

In particular I'm trying to demystify the supposed Utah childcare shortage:

I suspect Utah has a very high rate of informal or unlicensed childcare, or exchanges between part-time working mothers, of which Utah has a lot [0]. So again there's much more behind the official stats than a mere headcount of licensed childcare providers.

From Gemini + other article: "In Utah, unlicensed child care providers can care for up to eight [previously six, prior to 2024 HB153] children in their home without needing to be licensed. This means they are not required to have mandatory training, background checks, or undergo safety oversight, which raises concerns about the quality and safety of care provided. Voices for Utah Children says it is the second-highest limit in the nation for unregulated childcare."

[0]: https://universe.byu.edu/2019/01/14/how-utahs-child-care-cha...

Since different US states regulate childcare very differently, it seems silly to compare "licensed childcare headcount" across states as if it was some invariant. And "unlicensed childcare" could merely mean "potentially very high quality childcare, just involving <8 children and the person doesn't have a license, or in a part-time/reciprocal arrangement". Whereas in other states it could be much worse.

Maybe it's a less meaningless methodology to try to estimate demand vs availability by looking at childcare prices in a locality normalized by per-capita income?

CNBC’s model puts hefty weight on social-policy scores (abortion, LGBTQ protections, worker rules) and only a light touch on nuts-and-bolts stuff like housing costs, taxes, and job growth. If those social factors top your list, the rankings make sense; if you care more about affordability or wages, the picture flips.

The article has a confusing link to their methodology section.

The article itself is about their "Quality of Life" ranking, which is weighted into (at 10.6%) their "Top States for Business" ranking. The methodology link in the article jumps to the "Quality of Life" section within the "Top States for Business", ranking, but the other "Top States for Business" weights aren't considered in the "Quality of Life" ranking given in the article.

If you only look at just the "Quality of Life" methodology you'll see that it's— much worse than you were thinking. There's no weights given, but of more than ten metrics considered, it looks like eight or nine of them are purely based on policy, with almost no nuts-and-bolts consideration.

It’s a trash article based on cherry picked data that likely fit the bias of the author. You can immediately tell what those biases are by looking at the states picked & the reasons why

CNBC's methodology assigns 15% weight to "Life, Health and Inclusion" (social policies) versus 5% for "Cost of Living" and 15% for "Economy" - the full breakdown is available in their methodology document.

I read that, but you can see a common factor and probably bias just by reading the descriptions and photos used. I understand that people have opinions and my comment goes against this community, but this is what people with common sense can notice.

I wondered about the Utah rankings. There are a lot stay at home parents in the population there. And a lot of multi family and generational sharing. I wondered if those affected the low child care center numbers. Otherwise, the rest resonated.

> 2025′s worst state for quality of life: Tennessee

If you take statewide averages, yes. But Williamson County, TN is the US's 7th richest, according to Forbes magazine's annual rankings, with a median income of $104,367 [0]. [It also has the lowest violent crime rate of TN counties [1]].

> "The fastest growing county in Tennessee, over half of the 489,250 residents are college educated. The biggest employers in the county are Community Health Systems Inc., United Healthcare and Nissan North America. Williamson County attracts new business with low costs— it has the lowest county tax in the Nashville area, no state income tax and the Nashville area has a 4% lower cost of living than the national average," Forbes wrote.

[0]: https://patch.com/tennessee/franklin/williamson-county-natio...

[1]: https://mtsusidelines.com/2024/04/11/crime-rates-in-tennesse...

Memphis, TN (Shelby County) has the highest homicide rate in the entire country.

Why is it in any way meaningful to lump that in with unrelated small cities and counties in TN? (any more than including/excluding East Hammond, IN's gun sales in Chicago metro stats?)

To @bigbacalaoa:

The city of Franklin and Williamson County, TN are not Nashville; they're separate things in the Nashville metropolitan area. So your analogy to neighborhoods of Sao Paolo is offbase.

Ranking crime rates by city or county, instead of by state, reverses the correlation between crime rates and politics: https://manhattan.institute/article/red-vs-blue-crime-debate...

That article is from a conservative organization, and local crime rates have a much larger impact on individuals than state crime rates, so they could make a "we're right and you're wrong" claim by focusing on the more pertinent data, but instead they came to an even better conclusion: The correlation is so weak that it's easy to manipulate into any outcome, so it's not worth considering.

A very small correlation to a specific category may be statistically significant, but it's what doctors call clinically insignificant, which is to say it doesn't make enough of a difference to bother with.

Really appreciate your link but I can't understand if "that article" and "they" is referring to Manhattan Institute, my citation of Patch, or the ancestor CNBC article. So I can't understand your second paragraph.

I think that they are saying that you and/or TFA re: Utah may be making something like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, or maybe even the exception that proves the rule of that fallacy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

> The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are overemphasized. From this reasoning, a false conclusion is inferred. This fallacy is the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which is the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist.

> The name comes from a metaphor about a person from Texas who fires a gun at the side of a barn, then paints a shooting target centered on the tightest cluster of shots and claims to be a sharpshooter.

By not being able to account for the commonly held belief that Utah has a high standard of living, and by focusing on factors that may not be relevant to the standard of living in a specific regard due to local conditions, such as the lower incidence of childcare faciilties not coming up as much due to larger (extended) families filling the gap, while not accounting for that either way in their analysis because it was a blind spot to begin with and wasn't properly hypothesized before analysis, etc, this might be a version of an exception to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy that proves the rule, because it seems that there are actual sharpshooters around, and we find ourselves in Texas, hypothetically speaking.

I was just responding to your question about local vs state statistics, not the original article, so "they" was meant to refer to the Manhattan Institute, in the article I linked.

> the Sooner State’s violent crime rate is the 14th highest in the country

OK, so that means the 13 higher-crime states are on this list, too, right? If that's literally the only reason TFA lists Oklahoma...

Sloppy ink-stabbing. A more experienced polemicist would have said "among the highest".

I understand people are questioning the methodology used to create the rankings, but what if this is a false flag operation where a subversive conservative tried to put out a piece reaffirming progressive beliefs that these places are too squalid to survive?

Having lived in 8 states, red and blue, big and small, I find this article deeply flawed.

“American business is still in the grips of a serious lack of skilled employees.”

The entire article was invalidated in one sentence in their intro.

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