re: SEC States Rankings using : Health, Education, Economy, Population Growth

quote:

---

You're comparing Mississippi residents to illegals?

---

I prefer illegals, at least they work

quote:

---

I prefer illegals, at least they work

---

Strange...every time I go to the delta in Arkansas and Mississippi I see nothing but blacks working. Doing road work, law enforcement, fire fighters, construction, working in stores, teaching, gas stations, etc. Where does the myth come from that people don't work...maybe the wages are waaaay low unless they work for free.

It's more to do with low wages if you really want to be honest. You can't sit there and say NONE of those people in the delta work but when you go to that area that's all you see working.

When wages in an area avg under $8/hr and you can do the same job in other states for $12-15/hr then you'll qualify for Govt benefits more in that area compared to someone in another state doing the same job that puts them over the poverty line.

Mississippians, in general, suck at everything. Yet they strut around tRant like they're hot shite. They've gotten too big for their confederate britches and are long overdue to be brought down a peg.

Kentucky has a small black population due to the simole fact that if you made it this far as a slave, you hauled arse across the Ohio River in to Indiana or Ohio. You don't stop before you reach the finish line in a 10K do you?

So when we rank low on these lists, it's Eastern Kentucky that usually pulls us down. Ridiculous poverty in the mountains. Plus we like to smoke, drink, and eat good. No shame in that.

quote:

---

This guy said an oxymoron. Prestigious Black College. Note there are black colleges that are much,much better than other black colleges but none of them can hold a candle to any state university.

---

Except for the fact that Howard University has a higher ranked business school than OM, State, Kentucky, or Auburn. A higher ranked education school than Bama, LSU, or State. And a higher ranked law school than OM, A&M, or Kentucky.

quote:

---

4. South Carolina (5.25)

---

One of the most underrated places to live in the eastern US.

Louisiana is not last.


I'll take it.

Man, you guys are eaten up with this collectivist nonsense these days.

But let's pretend for a minute that averages and overly aggregated data are anything other than useless for meaningful analysis. (Did you know that most people have an above average number of legs?) Let's at least do the meaninglessness analysis correctly.

Just averaging rankings doesn't actually give each metric equal weight. It over-weights metrics where there is less difference between highs and lows.

For example, let's say we make one of the metrics female to male ratios. Number 1 and number 11 would essentially be tied, but it would get the same weight as state product per capita, even if number 1 were 3x number 11.

The right approach would be to normalize the data. Start with a linear normalization where y = (x - MIN)/(MAX - MIN). that would rescale the data for each metric between 0 and 1. As long as there are no extreme outliers (I doubt there are) you can average those or give them weights based on which metrics are more important.

If there are any extreme outliers, those metrics will be underweighted, and you'll need to standardize the data instead. y = (x - mean) / stdev. This will rescale the data to have an average of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.

It won't change the fact that what was going on in Clarksdale had close to zero impact on my quality of life growing up in Pascagoula or that, despite growing up in a working class home and going to shitty elementary and middle schools, I didn't learn any less in game theory or combinatorics at Ole Miss than I world have if I'd been from Connecticut and taken those classes at MIT.