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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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?
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".
smcin•9h ago
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...
smcin•9h ago
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.
dlcarrier•9h ago
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.
smcin•8h ago
aspenmayer•5h ago
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.