What a shame voters don't seem to care. Fucking abortions was the biggest issue in the midterms.

same here

Feb 14

That's the thing about minorities. When they're minor, they don't affect the polarization metrics much.

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India being in the bottom left is... A statement! Wonder how religious minorities feel about India being in the bottom left.

> why do you care what they other 49 do?

Well we don’t live in a vaccuum. What happens in one state affects the others.

Most obvious example is federal funding. Red states disproportionately take more than they contribute. Blue states are the reverse.

This is one of the reasons it feels particularly frustrating that the electoral college is a thing. I.e. minority opinions can dominate and take take take.

Your experience differs from mine. Out of a dozen items in my latest trip (all consumables/perishables), one of them jumped by about 50% (eggs), the rest jumped by a buck or so, one item actually went down (dish detergent).

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Curious what the fed will do come Feb 1. I feel like they might announce a short pause to rate hikes to assess. I am worried about the monetary policy lag

Then there's countries so far to the top right that you don't realize are a part of the graph

I fail to grasp how countries with a single party can be not polarized, I suppose the poll was not done to people in jail. Also i guess Russia is so much in the bottom left they are outside the graph.

Given all differences between the red and blue states, your assumption that all the trends in your chosen metrics are solely/mainly caused by rep vs dem governance is totally unfounded. Have you ruled out effects of agricultural vs trading oriented states? Or sparsely populated vs densely populated states? Demographics? I'm not saying it doesn't have any influence, but why would voting behaviour be the root cause instead of one or more of these other factors? In fact you didn't even look at the historical governance, but only at the 2020 elections... This has the same energy as using the notorious FBI crime statistics to prove a point about ethnicities.

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Hooray to Malaysian optimism!

Definitely agree that is partly true.

But then it also begs the question...does every American have to believe generating wealth is the biggest priority for government? Meaning does everyone see drawing wealth to a state a meaningful measurement of success for a state government?

I would suggest the state governments generally reflect the desires of the people. In a largely rural state with mostly blue collar people and jobs...are the people going to place a high value on education beyond high school? Are people in urban areas that own little or no actual property going to care about high property taxes to the same degree someone who lives on 5 acres will?

Red voters judge blue states against their own priorities, and blue voters judge red states against their own values. And I guess my thought is who cares? If you state is doing okay, why do you care what they other 49 do? And if your state is not doing okay, fix it before worrying about the other 49.

With 330 million people in this country there's going to be a lot of variation in political beliefs and values and what people consider important. And the states should reflect that variation, and they do.

Whenever there’s a chicken vs egg type question the answer is almost always both.

Poor states are red because red states are poor.

... "politics" I used to brush aside as "he said, she said" discussions; then I noticed in 2016 that in a table of "obesity" data that the most obese states were Rep. In 2020 the observation was repeated (14 of most obese states were Rep, posted 29Apr21).

... really?! it should be 'random' ... what about other metrics?

... other metrics: NOT random (summary post, 14Apr2022). suicide rate, incarceration, ed spending, life expectancy, infant mortality, accidental deaths, GDP state taxes, gun ownership, murder rate, violent crime, and others were NOT random.

I suspect that the reason for the Systemic Bias of the data is not a matter of "opinion".

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Max Boot has suggested, WaPost, 26Oct2022:
There are many reasons, from history to geography, why per capita GDP in the United Kingdom ($47,334) is so much higher than in Russia ($12,172) or China ($12,556), but I would argue it ultimately comes down to governance. Britain, as a liberal democracy, has long been run for the benefit of its people, while Russia and China have always been run primarily for the benefit of their rulers.

I think that he is correct: in this case, Rep governance ("rulers" = "of the few, by the few, for the few") is the reason for the data differentiation.

I'm not a fan of how these are plotted.

This could have three bar plots, with "Red States" and "Blue States" on the X-axis (y-axes the same). Error bars to indicate the variability across red or blue states. Actually, it would have been even better at the level of congressional districts, but I don't know if those data are readily available.

Also, Mann-Whitney U-Test instead of a t-test (unless you can demonstrate a normal distribution).

the crew went on strike so they replaced all of the jedi with sand

They claim to be +/- .13% on a monthly basis (not YoY so each months inflation.) when months are averaging around 1% inflation that’s pretty good. On months averaging .2-.3% inflation, that’s not good estimation.

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Interesting data. How accurate have prediction markets been historically?

Went shopping at Costco last night. Holy fuck, it's like everything jumped 50%+ since my last visit.

I would suggest dictators lie about pretty much everything.