Physical Topography (of the American West) Associated with Human Personality

You can find the paper here. I have only read the abstract since there's a paywall. Questions: how does this correlate with the settlement patterns discussed in Albion's Seed, in this genetic analysis, or the Bad Stripe? (The Bad Stripe roughly correlates with Greater Appalachia in the former article, or the Border Reavers in Albion's Seed.)

Götz, F.M., Stieger, S., Gosling, S.D. et al. Physical topography is associated with human personality. Nat Hum Behav (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0930-x

The Benefit of Joining the United States Comes from Becoming More Like New England

In an SSRN paper, Maseland and Spruk look at an interesting counterfactual: how would territories have performed that did in reality join the US, if they had not? Also, how might some countries had performed if they had joined the US, when in actual fact they never (fully) did? For this second question the countries are Puerto Rico, Cuba, Greenland and the Philippines. (Newfoundland strongly considered it, mid-20th century.) They find that joining the US is beneficial. However, and more interesting, they find that this effect is in part mediated by the states that actually did join, importing institutional values which are most similar to those of New England states.

This is interesting, because a) there is an overrepresentation of New England-bred and -educated people in America's cultural elites; b) the book Albion's Seed notes the different values brought by settlers from different parts of England to the New World, and as New England Puritans were literally breeding for intelligence, it's not a surprise they had such an outsize impact; c) this may relate to the "law of the Canadian border", which prompts one to ask d) if the benefit of joining the US decreases as one moves south - i.e., since Wyoming was much more likely to receive New England institutional norms than say, Mississippi (based on the country's predominantly east-west migration patterns), does that mean Mississippi did not benefit as much?

Which States Are Americans Moving To and From, As Related to Cost of Living

United Van Lines publishes an annual list of the move-to, move-away balance for each state. With the exception of Vermont there are no big surprises - although many Californians, accustomed as we are to the articles about everyone leaving California, might be shocked to learn that we're only on the move-away side of the balance sheet by less than 2 percentage points.

Here's the scatter plot:


No surprise, people are moving to cheap places. For every cent more a dollar is worth, there's another percent of the move there-move away balance toward people going there.

Are there cheap places people aren't moving to? Yes - Mississippi, Iowa, and Missouri. In fact there's a cluster of cheap places people aren't moving to, and they're in the South and Midwest. Besides the climactic desirability of a place, low cost of living correlates with subpar growth and not many jobs. Yes, people will move to cheaper states in/near the Northeast (proximity to expensive cities) for retirement or if forced out by rent, but if a state is in a large area of other cheap states (not many jobs) then there won't be as much reason to move between them. Hence, the Midwest and Southern states that are cheap, but not attracting many people. (Meanwhile, cheap Idaho is drawing plenty of in-migration - probably coastal retirees, especially from California.)

Are there expensive places people are moving to anyway? Yes, Washington State. Probably mostly Californians, coming from an even more expensive place. Similarly, Vermont is notably off-trend, also in that direction. Probably lots of Bostonians and some New Yorkers.

Not sure what's so great in Vermont. I'm sure it's nice and all, but 3-to-1 move-in to move-out?

Australia and USA Populating at the Same Rate: Coincidence?

I wondered: how does Australia's current population density compare to the U.S.'s at the same point in its history? Australia's first colony was founded in 231 years ago in 1788; the future U.S.'s first continuous colony that was a center of population expansion (i.e., Jamestown, not St. Augustine or Roanoke) was founded in 1609.

Today, 231 years after its founding colony in 1788,* Australia has a population of 25,203,198, giving a population density of 7.93 people per square mile.

In 1840, 231 years after its founding colony in 1609, the USA had 17,069,453 people. Taking into account its size at the time, the U.S. had almost exactly the same population density with 7.92 people per square mile.

Interesting, but possibly coincidental. The first observation to make is accessibility: from the period 1788 until today, it's much easier to get to a new land and spread out from one's landing location than it was in the period 1609 to 1840. Australia is also further away from Europe. Had Australia been settled at the same time, I doubt it would have filled as fast. There also seems to have been more reproduction with natives in North America, and also a denser native population (for the continent, an upper bound around 20 million is often estimated, versus Australia with 2 million.)

Related to its lower pre-colonial native population, Australia is also not as innately hospitable as the U.S. Large portions of the coast are inaccessible swamp, and a massive portion of the interior is desert with poor soil. Because the coasts are much better, Australia's population in 2019 is 86% urbanized, versus 10.8% in the U.S. in 1840.

Related to not being as hospitable, Canada is the obvious comparator. Canada at a similar point after its first colony had a density of 0.29 people per square mile, more than 27 times lower than the U.S. at that time, despite beyond as close or closer. (It's still 8 times lower today, despite having a 5-year head start.)


*I'm not counting the ancient Indian contact with Australia, which is now genetically confirmed. It turns out that's right around the time dingoes appeared - likely not a coincidence.

A Morbid Calculation: Conquest Rate of the Americas and Cultural Assimilation Rates

The first European set foot on what would later become the United States in 1513. The last uncontacted indigenous person was captured in 1911. Many people are familiar with the story of Ishi; the picture above is of the monument commemorating the place in Oroville, California where he came under the power of European-descended people. (Image credit to Ray_Explores on Flickr.) This marker commemorates not just Ishi, but the date and place at which an entire nation's worth of indigenous people had finally been completely assimilated or exterminated - on August 29, 1911.

If taken in terms of territory, if it's just a linear expansion of a certain amount per unit time, then the annual expansion was 9,450 sq mi (24,729 km^2) per year; meaning a square of land about 98 miles (157 km) on a side. If we break it down to the day, then the U.S. was taking 26 sq mi per day (blocks 5.1 miles on a side.) Given the average American County size, that means every 46.5 days (about a month and a half) the U.S. was taking a county's worth of land in our march to manifest destiny. (I realize it didn't happen this smoothly but it gives us an idea.)

If we go by percent expansion (the more land you already got, the faster you get more), and we assume Ponce de Leon's camp when he landed was a square a hundredth of a mile on a side, then Europeans expanded at an average annual rate of 6.31%. Again, assuming this was a completely smooth process just for visualization purposes, that means the last year the US would have added territory equal to an area bigger than California but smaller than Texas. If going down to the day, the day Ishi was captured/gave himself up the US added half a county's worth of land.

But people are what we're most interested in here, and in human terms, the annualized assimilation rate for the United States of 4.1% over those 398 years. Obviously the size of the territory matters; to get a second data set to investigate territory size effects, I tried to find a similar event in the history of Canada but could not. With more than one country, we could get an idea of how the territory affects the rate.

Although it's not a conquest in the same way, it's been noted that the time for Germanic people to take over the Western Roman Empire was about six centuries, which corresponds to a 2.45% annualized rate of assimilation. In territory, in linear terms it's more than seven times slower, gaining 1,292 sq mi/year (an area 35.9 miles on a side.) In percentage terms, it's a 3.89% annual increase, using the same assumptions, i.e. same starting area, except this time it's a camp in the Black Forest instead of the Florida Coast. This is to be expected given that transportation was not as good and the technology gap between the Germanic tribes and the Romans was not nearly as great as between Europeans and North Americans; same people have likened colonization to being invaded by people from 4,000 years in the future.

Remembering Jefferson; Forgetting Lee

As monuments to Robert E. Lee have been dismantled, there have been debates about whether we should do the same for monuments to Thomas Jefferson. Wasn't he a slave-owner as well?

Here's why in the United States we should keep statues of Jefferson but not Lee.

Thomas Jefferson owned, and by most accounts, mistreated, his slaves, even by the standards of the antebellum South. However, people revere his memory despite this, and not because of this.

Robert E. Lee invaded the United States in an attempt to destroy the country and to continue the institution of slavery. The people who revere his memory do revere him because of this. Nothing else in his legacy is remotely as important.

Both Jefferson and Lee were imperfect human beings who did immoral things that, thanks to moral progress, are no longer legal or tolerated by decent people today. But only one of the two made it his life's work to actively try to continue slavery and destroy the United States of America, since that had become necessary to continue slavery. We absolutely should not try to forget unpleasant facts about them, any more than we should forget the slaughter of the native people that lived in North America before Europeans arrived, or Germans should forget the Holocaust. Indeed, it's critical that we remember that otherwise decent people somehow looked the other way and did these things or allowed them to happen.

It is important to consider that if moral progress is real, and continuing, then most of us today are certainly doing things that our great grandchildren will find morally abhorrent.

Unfortunately slavery is not yet a historical footnote, and continues in several countries today. Here's how you can help.

Happiness by State in the US, 2018

A study done by Wallethub (their image below) using their own 31-factor happiness index shows the Bad Stripe, along with a few other interesting patterns.


1) The Bad Stripe (West Virgina, Kentucky and Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma) is evident as a negative outlier as usual. These make up 6 of the bottom 11. For fans of Albion's Seed, this is where the Reavers are, i.e. Greater Appalachia. This also shows the limitation of a state-level analysis. There is significant structure within the states. Pennsylvania's southwest if taken separately would very likely look like West Virginia. The southeast if taken separately would be much more like New York and New Jersey. Same thing for Missouri - the northern part of the state is likely more like the Upper Midwest, and the southern part is the Ozarks, part of the Bad Stripe and more like Arkansas.

2) The Upper Midwest and Utah stand out as positive outliers, as usual. Moynihan's Law - is it the result of Yankee settlers (again Albion's Seed), non-British Isles North European immigrants, or some combination? (Map below from Wiki on German Ancestry in the USA and Canada.)



3) Very interesting that two demographically similar states like the Carolinas could be so different in this rating. North Carolina has done better economically than South Carolina, and culturally does tend to move in sync with Virgina (perhaps most famously in the 2008 presidential election predicted by Nate Silver) - which makes sense because South Carolina was largely settled from Georgia initially, and North Carolina from Virginia. Still, they're not THAT different, and they have a very different happiness outcome.

4) I can't argue for similar historical links to the Reavers for Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, who as always fare very poorly. You'll have to develop your own theory for that!

Patterns that Emerge In Both Social Conservatives and Social Leftists

The American left is beginning to curiously resemble the right - not in its positions, but in dynamics and behavior. I can't quite say "mirror" unless we're talking about a tinted fun-house mirror, because it's not the specific concrete positions of the left that resemble those of social conservatives, but rather the social dynamics and patterns of the discussions about these concrete positions that are becoming so bizarrely similar. I use "social leftist" rather than liberal or social liberal because a clear division has emerged. What I mean by this term is a group of American progressives more focused on race and gender issues than the average liberal, active and strident on social media, and demanding removal of platforms and free speech protections for political opponents. Conservatives have traditionally been divided among social, nationalist and economic conservatives ("God, country and market") and the cracks inside the GOP show these tectonic segments. The Democratic party of the late twentieth century was more divided among identity politics lines (which we're now paying for; more on this in a second) but the Dems are not immune to the realignments in American politics either, and what's emerging is something I think very like the traditional divisions within the GOP. And what's more, these divisions mirror the old GOP fault lines, for reasons of basic psychology, and similar dynamics emerge.

For the past one or two decades there has been a growing awareness that each person's political positions are strongly influenced - maybe even dominated - by our temperament. This is in turn determined by genetics (yes, really) and our early life experiences and cultural programming, none of which is within our conscious control. This is actually quite a depressing reality since in a democracy, we hope that we can change our minds about politics based on reasoning about new information, as opposed to psychotherapy or genetic engineering. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt founded the field of moral foundations theory, showing that all humans base their moral sense on five dimensions - care/harm, sanctity/purity, authority/respect, loyalty, and fairness. Only a truly disordered or feral mind ignores any of them completely. Where we differ is in the importance we assign to each. Not only do humans differ significantly, we tend to fall into clusters. Given the nature of those moral dimensions, you can already imagine how this might sort us politically, and indeed there are clear differences in which of those dimensions liberals and conservatives value.[1] This is why you can travel to other countries with open political systems and instinctively figure out who the conservatives and liberals are by talking to or seeing the kinds of people in each party, although the concrete coalitions on-the-ground that make political engines run in the real world can mask this from time to time.[2]

And this is what's so interesting about the social left, because it's diverging from "traditional" American liberals in its emphasis on certain values that historically have been conspicuously unimportant to American liberals. What follows is an analysis of the social left's behavior and what this tells us about those emerging value differences, an explanation of the concrete moving parts in the psychology of social leftists, and a demonstration of the parallels to social conservatives.


1) Social conservatives and the social left tend to take positions that resemble tribal affiliations or identity, and any effort to reason coolly about them meets with outrage. Social conservatives and the social left seem to think that if (people stopped having casual sex and abortions, or the white power structure was destroyed) that suddenly all the world's problems would be solved, and are quite offended when asked to objectively, quantitatively measure the harms that these claimed evils are causing. People in the social arm of both ends of the spectrum tend to be much more insular and extreme. Interestingly, libertarians have a much easier time getting along with more economic leftists and rightists alike. This may be what it necessarily looks like when people on right and left confuse politics with uncompromise-able cultural and/or moral values, and I suspect that it's the tribal identity and in-group thinking this engenders that explains why the social arms of political affiliations demonstrate these patterns. That this would emerge in the social left is not surprising given the ongoing focus on the left on identity politics, so that now these political affiliations are associated with ethnicity and unfortunately even more set in stone, but now that here is unfortunately a white identity politics on the social right, the parallels are striking.[3]

2) While both conservatives and liberals value the care/harm value foundation, it's much more important to liberals and much more abstract, and this is exaggerated on the social left. That is, conservatives focus on active harm done to one's concrete in-group, especially family; for liberals, it can be mere absence of caring for other humans that you've never met. In fact not actively caring for certain people is constantly conflated with actively harming them. Witness the meme virtue signaling, "If you can't understand why you should care about other people, you're beyond help", usually with a conservative response having to do with neglecting one's concrete in-group peers "maybe you should take care of your kids first", etc. Many conservatives and libertarians are at best puzzled by the liberal fixation with others having a right to be cared about, and sometimes outraged at the presumptuous demand to care about strangers this places on them. The social left in particular demonizes not caring enough, and the care should be self-sacrificial of any claim to morality or authority if the obligated carer is far enough below the care-ee in the victim hierarchy.

3) The social left's extreme focus on the harm/care foundation is reinforced by the use of outrage as moral currency, and in this closely imitates social conservatives. That is, the public profession of negative affect as a sign that one has the right values, has them so much a part of their identity that threatening them causes such a strong reaction, and that this reaction will motivate the person to work in service to the tribe. Negative affect also includes sadness but sadness is a weakening emotion, and if you're using this for a status display to appear high-status to others in the tribe, negative affect mostly has to be anger.

4) A result of outrage as moral currency and well-spring of status is that any attempt by an outgroup to decrease the outrage, even by apologizing and reversing exactly the act/position/statement that incurred the outrage to begin with, will meet with even greater outrage. An outsider trying to decrease anger is profoundly threatening, because they're essentially shutting off the status-ATM that the outraged person is getting rich from. This is why apologies to either the social right or especially social left are inadvisable, because they don't ever work - in fact they cannot.

5) Among social conservatives, the outrage factory's fuel is threat to authority and sanctity, which are not as important to traditional liberals, but are important to social leftists. "Normal" liberals can get angry when conservatives don't care enough, but they don't typically appeal to personal authority or the sanctity of an abstract entity, whether it's a group of people or a symbol.[4] Point out an inconsistency in the Bible to an American social conservative, and you know what will happen. But the same will happen if you do the same with Marx or Linda Sarsour to a social leftist. (Try to quote them in support of your position and the reaction may be even worse - see #9 below.) The "victimhood hierarcy" and the groups of people in it (the groups - not the individuals, but the abstract groups) are all-important to the social left as sacred. To the social left, none of the very real historical tragedies can ever be truly corrected and to suggest concrete policies that might actually do that produce explosions of outrage. This seems strange because you might think you're addressing this person's concerns, but really what you're doing is trying to dissolve the central sacred object. Imagine you invent a time machine and go to the Pope, offering to go back and stop the crucifiction of his beloved savior from taking place. His reaction won't be an immediate "yes", will it? So another way of putting this: smart-ass atheists that point out to Christians that they should be thankful to Pontius Pilate for facilitating Christ's sacrifice get the same reaction as traditional liberals who suggest to the social left that Policy X may actually really-and-truly correct the impact of slavery and racism on African-Americans. I suspect that there is a feedback loop once any group (political or otherwise) begins to see itself as a tribe, as a group per se, and separate itself from outsiders, that induces a focus on and strengthening of authorities and sacred objects. (As opposed to a bête noire, we might call those authorities and sacred entities "white beasts". The negative connotation of the term and the parallelism with objects of scorn makes it better than "sacred cow.") One interesting difference between the two tribes is that often, social conservatives are open to pointing out that things are off-limits, that they're flat out not interested in seeing if reason supports their positions, etc. The social left has to do a lot more rhetorical fluorishes to support their own authoritarianism, because it's important to tribal identity that they are not authoritarian, and don't you dare question that or there will be consequences!

6) Just pointing out the inviolability of authority or sanctity of the white beasts of social rightists or leftists raises blood pressure, because it draws attention to their unquestionability and implies that it's possible for these things NOT to have authority or be sacred. ("I'm not disagreeing, just trying to understand. So this cracker actually IS the body of your god?" "Wait, why do black trans women have it worse than white gay men?") Many on the social left argue that some people are just so far outside the victim hierarchy that they can never really be considered to be oppressed, and if you suggest otherwise or keep asking questions, it's because you're morally bad. E.g., point out that maybe a broke single mother of four in Appalachia with a tenth-grade education is oppressed in some ways, and you'll be called a racist, and told of course you believe that because you're white (or male, or straight, whatever.) Here you are, a heathen, telling a Christian "Come on guys, actually getting crucified doesn't hurt THAT bad, and anyway the gospels aren't really that well-written." Again, this is the social left's reaction. Traditional liberals might disagree with you on something, but are likely to try to explain it instead of telling you that you're a dirty sinner and to shut up.

7) The social left's demand for censorship of dissenting voices over the past few years (both defectors and traditional opponents) is another sign of the appeal to authority previously unusual among traditional liberals. And consistent with the theory, the argument is that free speech on the right harms the most valuable people in the sacred victim hierarchy. So far the main authority where they'e been able to exert influence is universities. This is probably the behavior that contrasts the most with traditional liberal temperament and not surprisingly troubles traditional liberals the most. (And outraged social leftists - if you've gotten this far in the post, it's worth pointing out that when free speech does get restricted, it's never an intellectual or artist who's enforcing it based on just principles - see: Trotsky vs Stalin - it's the local J. Edgar Hoover or Donald Trump, deciding what offends his personal authority and taste. By demanding a roll-back of speech freedoms you're giving Trump what he wants - if not tomorrow, then next week.)

8) Outrage-as-status-currency makes it very hard for social leftists or rightists to "come in from the cold". They're only as good as their last expression of angry moral contempt. If they stop doing this, they become turncoats to the movement, inauthentic people willing to actually engage with the other side and get moral cooties. Think of a rebel leader who might not really want the civil war in his country to end, because his skillset is limited to organizing violence, and does not include drafting constitutions or getting elected to public office. (Think of the absurdity - someone who started out fighting to get rid of the old guard, but because of their entrenched interests, doesn't really want the fight to end.) Turncoats are often met with more anger and derision than those who've been in the outgroup the whole time.

9) Among tribal thinkers including social conservatives and leftists, beliefs usually serve more importantly as markers of tribal loyalty than as tools to make decisions (and "decision" in politics means policy.) Even though a social leftist or conservative might say with desperate passion that they wish the government would do X - goodness forbid that a political opponent actually does X! Although a rational person would say "Good, I'm glad we got through to somebody - even though I disagree with the other side on everything else, at least they did something right and we're moving forward on this one thing." But that's not what happens is it? No, the appropriation of a sacred value is also profoundly threatening to the moral authority of tribalist thinking. At first the outrage is that the enemy says they will do X, but (so the outraged parties claim) the enemy won't really do it - or is doing it for the wrong reasons (so what?) And then, when X actually does come to pass, strangely the tribalists aren't so interested in talking about it anymore. Witness the inexplicable anger from the left at Obama's switch to supporting marriage equality, or the irrational grumbling from the right at Bill Clinton's embrace of certain business-friendly practices. And I understand the tendency. (A self-disclosure gives a current example - Trump is the worst president we've ever had and the sooner he's gone, the better. But his administration just proposed decreasing business tax reporting from quarterly to semi-annually. I have to admit this isn't a bad idea. And yet I still feel the urge to say that he's probably just saying it and won't really put it through, that the idea probably didn't come from him, or if it did he probably has some personal tax angle on it, etc. - but it's still a good idea.)

10) It's useful to notice the specific kinds of people who've served as canaries in the political coal mine who have first noticed the curious behavior of social leftists, relative to traditional liberals - especially when the canaries are actually social leftists themselves! These people are a) little-l libertarians (who argue with their traditional liberal friends about economics but are usually on board with social issues), b) atheists (the majority of whom are at least socially liberal) and c) traditional centrist liberals. Centrist liberals are low on the authority and sanctity dimensions, as are atheists; the censorship and inability to question social leftists in good faith troubles them (even centrist-liberal Obama addressed this while he was in office.) Little-l libertarians are in addition low on the care dimension, and they resent being told who they have to help (which costs money); unlike many conservatives, libertarians have no problem with marriage equality for example, but being told they have to use certain pronouns and can't ask why certainly rubs them the wrong way. And these groups of people are increasingly pointing out the uncomfortable disconnects in social leftists' viewpoints, which of course social leftists will not explore or tolerate having questioned or pointed out. Chiefly among them is the double-standard where Christians (you would think, according to the leftists are the only oppressors of women and LGBTQ people) which puts social leftists in the bizarre position of defending the most oppressive backward and medieval religion in the world (amazingly, atheists who criticize Islam become oppressor imperialists in this narrative.) Another example which is gaining traction is the discrimination by elite colleges against Asian applicants, uncomfortable to social leftists for several reasons. First, the university is the leftists' natural home and the one place where they actually do exert any authority. Second, that there ARE elite universities which perpetuate class divisions in fact more effectively than the business world or even the racially well-integrated armed forces is not a welcome topic of inquiry. And third, that there exists an ethnic minority with its own history of institutionalized oppression (Asian-Americans) who have nonetheless succeeded superlatively in the U.S. - in fact, moreso economically than whites! - cannot be acknowledged without threatening the whole edifice, along with the fact that universities are now unique among American institutions in stating openly that they discriminate against non-whites in admissions.


Unfortunately for the authoritarians of the right or left, their white beasts are in fact quite open to discussion, no matter how offended they might get.[5] People on the left, in terms of organization their people around strong central authority, often sigh and make comments about herding cats. That lack of unity is core to the psychology of people drawn to the left and has always been the left's main obstacle to power, and I suspect that this newfound authoritarianism on the social left is too unstable to last very long.


FOOTNOTES

[1] There are also temperament differences between liberals and conservatives, related to the moral foundations; for example, conservatives tend to be more anxious, which could be argued is related to the conservative feature of considering authority more important. Autonomy is nice but if you're constantly under threat, you give some away to a strong protector.

[2] There may be an argument that bizarre coalitions make for less bitter politics. From the Civil War until Nixon's Southern strategy turned the blue South red, the U.S. actually had quite an odd coalition in each of its parties. The Democrats had Northern ethnic-minority labor unions and conservative Southerners (still amazingly enough voting with the unions out of spite at Abraham Lincoln.) The Republican party had Northern business and Southern minorities. This could only have lasted as long as it did in a two-party system, but Nixon recognized the fundamental mismatch that this accident of history had produced, especially obvious after the Johnson-Goldwater inversion of the electoral map in 1964. Since the Southern strategy our map in the East has looked much more like a Civil War map and the rest is an urban-rural divide and the tone of our politics has changed for the worse since then, because the parties identify more closely with immutable sociodemographic categories.

[3] You might ask, if identity politics was an earlier central influence on the left than the right, why the social left didn't emerge first. I think it has to do with access to public platforms. Before the internet era, right-wing white Christians, aligned as they were the business establishment, had more cash and therefore easier access to platforms than the left, which was relegated to a few magazines circulating in particular communities. That is to say, blame the internet. Today the right has both FOX and a lot of people on Twitter, while the left is still mostly online (MSNBC is not remotely the FOX of the left and is in any event a recent arrival.)

[4] Authority is about valuing without question, bargaining, or deliberate interpretation the word of a human. Sanctity is about doing the same for an abstract entity, which could be a symbolic physical object (e.g. the flag) or a people (e.g. the LGBTQ community.) As a result of this observation, I would bet that these two are the most closely related pair out of all possible pairs in his system.

[5] The rhetorical hostility of outrage-driven movements is easily hacked. In the same way that being the first to question a social conservative's conservative credentials will initially outrage then cow them (you can explain that you brought it up first because you're the real conservative, and now the other person is trying to explain, just like a mealy-mouthed liberal would!), when talking to a social leftist, always call them a racist immediately in the debate. They'll try to argue they're not, just like a racist would! Try it, it actually works - and in so doing, you'll be eroding the tactic's usefulness.

Dry Counties - Roughly Track the Bad Stripe

Above, map of dry counties in the US (Wiki.) Compare to one of many Bad Stripe maps, a map of Well-Being, below. This stripe pops out on various maps as a coherent region of the US ("Greater Appalachia") with various unique cultural characteristics and poor human development characteristics, here.

Time of Founding of Each American County

From Reddit user JFBoyy.

U.S. Presidents, Quality and Remembrance by Experts vs. Popular Opinion

Previously I measured the prominence of U.S. Presidents, using a quantitative measure (mentions in print as indexed by Google N-gram; a person publishing a book mentioning a President will have a greater level of expertise than someone chosen at random from the general public and asked about this President.) From this you can see which Presidents are being forgotten more or less quickly, based on how long they've been out of office. I also compared this how relatively forgotten or well-remembered they are against performance ratings given by historical experts. By doing this, you can see which bad Presidents we remember better than their time out of office would predict (and who maybe we should forget), and which good Presidents are unjustly slipping from memory.

Reading back through the Wiki article, I noticed they've added memorability and performance measures from the general public. Memorability and performance rankings from non-experts is bound to differ from the measures I performed already. So, for memorability I used the Roediger and De Soto Science paper,[1] and for performance I used the net favorability figure from the 2013 Rasmussen poll.

Here is the overall scatter plot for forgetting over time. The x-axis is years out of office, the y-axis is percent of general public remembering the President by surname.


As before, I guessed that forgetting happens more and more slowly over time. That is, people forgot about Polk faster in the first fifty years after he left office than the second fifty years. In the expert data this was born out and it was born out in the popular data as well, using the same two comparison groups (forgetting rate of the group J.Q. Adams through Cleveland, compared to McKinley through Reagan; not shown). In fact in both data sets there is a slight "negative" forgetting in the earlier group, i.e. the longer ago you were President, the better. (I started with J.Q. Adams because he was the first President who was not a founder, but the effect remained.)

Because of this effect (non-linear trend due to faster drop off in the more recent past) again I used a power law for goodness of fit, to determine whether Presidents were forgotten faster or slower than they otherwise would have been, on average, for that length of time out of office. I had to exclude Obama because he was in office (zero years out) during the survey and you can't include a zero value in a power law calculation. The figure on top is forgetting relative to appearance in print in 2000; on the bottom, to American's ability to remember this President's surname in 2014.




Here, there was a difference. For the experts, relative to how long they've been out of office, Gerald Ford was the most forgotten. Here, it's Chester Alan Arthur - who also holds the dubious distinction of being most forgotten in absolute terms as well (only 7% of Americans could remember him - tied with Franklin Pierce.) In fact, in popular remembrance Ford is not relatively more forgotten, but LBJ is (and in fact since this poll didn't distinguish LBJ and Andrew Johnson, presumably a least a tiny bit of this number is for the other President, so it's probably slightly worse than it appears here.) In fact there's only one other President from the last hundred years more forgotten relative to his time out of office than LBJ, and that's Harding. Charts are side-by-side for comparison. You can see the cluster of obscure late nineteenth century Presidents, more forgotten by the public than they are in print.

WHAT ABOUT PERFORMANCE VS. REMEMBRANCE?

First let's look at the net favorable ranking that the public gave for these Presidents, compared to their relative remembrance (distance above or below the remembrance curve, with a linear adjustment so the units come out the same for comparison to the previous blog post. X-axis is performance (left is better), Y-axis is memorability (up is well-remembered.) In other words, George Washington will be in the upper left.


The rankings above are not zero sum. That is, the public could conceivably rank everyone favorably, or unfavorably, and indeed you can see clustering on the left (good performing) side of the graph. But to compare apples to apples, let's line them up ordinally - so it IS zero sum - and compare to the experts rankings. By doing this, we break the Presidents into four quadrants based on whether they're in the top or bottom half of the performance rankings, and whether they are relatively forgotten or well-remembered based on where they are relative to the remembrance curve. The chart above is based on experts rankings and overall mentions in print; below, on public remembrance and net favorables.





The "unjust quadrants" are bad and relatively well-remembered, as well as good and forgotten. This chart looks somewhat different from the experts' rankings. For one thing, in popular opinion there's more clustering of the good, well-remembered Presidents (possibly those two variables are the more like the same thing, outside the experts.) Also, the worse-than-average Presidents are remembered in print a little better than than by the general public (see the group just above the memory line on the right side of the experts/print graph.) As Ford is the most forgotten in the expert/print world and Arthur to the public, I predict that over time public opinion converges to the experts; i.e. Ford will eventually be just as obscure as Arthur is now.

And finally, in the public mind, there is one clear outlier who performed poorly but is remembered well - Richard Nixon. In the latter, there isn't such separation. The three I've circled are, from left to right, Reagan, Wilson, and Garfield. Garfield!?![3] That last one may owe more to the comic strip;[4] and anyway, if only 19% of people remember you (as opposed to Reagan's 66%) how do they know if they like you or not? Consequently, an argument that the experts' rankings are at the very least more internally consistent. You should see the post, or at the very least read about the most unjustly forgotten successful President (per the experts), James Polk.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Note that the popular poll apparently went just by surname, which of course gives us five pairs of Presidents who can't be distinguished. When I assumed people were remembering one half the time and the other one half the time, or when I completely excluded them, the forgetting trend was the same.

[2] Internet surveys are not infrequently gamed, and the lowness of Reagan's numbers is suspect here, but it's the best I have available. To be clear, this isn't an endorsement of the Reagan administration - if you're liberal and you're annoyed by the thought that Reagan's memorability should be higher, compare to how much you hear Reagan being fetishized by Republicans and then go back and look at how low this number is. If it makes you feel better, assume that the number is not representative of full public opinion because Republicans don't know how to use the internet.

[3] A final insult to Arthur. You're the VP for a guy who is assassinated after just a few months in office, and you serve out almost his whole term, and people still remember him 2.5x as much as you?!?

[4] This comic generator is fun too.

Some Historical Analogies for This Point in American History

Several of these analogies have been lucidly argued elsewhere, and I've provided relevant links. Whether history rhymes or repeats, these patterns may prove instructive to anticipating the near future.

1. The end of the Belle Epoque and the Eve of the First World War. We don't need more essays despairing the rise of nationalism in turning politics away from globalism, heralding the end of the Davos order, but the rational detente of late 1800s Europe fell apart quickly in the face of nationalism and entangling alliances. Trump's election by nationalists and his entanglements with Russia expose this similarity. Today, Russia increasingly tests whether people in Cleveland want to risk a nuclear war over Lithuania. Little appreciated today is the shock World War I represented for globalism (or at least European internationalism), resulting in a decrease in international trade that didn't return to pre-WWI levels until the 1970s. For me, this analogy is the most poignant of all that I list here, since there are clear cyclical waves in trade and political relationships, some of them quite macro. The most obvious is the onset of the Middle Ages in Europe after the fall of Rome, but even this was a repeat (and a pale one) of the dark ages of antiquity, the late bronze age collapse in the Mediterranean. A decrease in international relationships is of obvious advantage to regional powers with chronically anemic economies but large militaries, like Russia. [Added April 2020: economist Alex Tabarrok implies with his lightly edited quote by Keynes that we are seeing the end of the neoliberal Belle Epoque as COVID-19 causes the collapse of supply chains and countries to draw back into themselves. I think this is a little overblown as many of the economic indicators that worsen in pandemics return quickly once it passes, and the real Belle Epoque ended because of a long war and the devastation of Europe and both human and physical capital. That said, if this is indeed another Fin-de-Belle Epoque, I greatly prefer it be from pandemic instead of war.]

2. The Washingtonian Dynasty Losing the Mandate of Heaven. It's a truism that Chinese dynasties last on the order of two centuries. This pattern holds for other large states. Taking the Roman Empire as a succession of two states punctuated by the Crisis of the Third Century, we have two dynasties of not quite two centuries. The U.S.'s founding moral authority and legitimacy stem from our belief in the specialness of our constitution. Though I count myself a patriot I must admit that if I heard an Australian or Mexican or Indian talking about her constitution with the same unquestioning reverence that we hold toward our own, it would seem rather strange (never mind if someone from Indiana or Oregon talked that way.) Red and blue state Americans have not begun to question the constitution in earnest as much as have irreconcilable ideas of what it means. If the American Civil War was nearly a North-South constitutional echo of the East-West scriptural schism of Europe, this may be the Reformation. What has suddenly exacerbated this difference? One possibility is a status monoculture brought about by social media. There are few things worse by being looked down upon by morally illegitimate people, pretending to be in the right, and bashing traditional values that only your own side really understands. With social media and outrage-mongering fighting for our attention, this fight for status is shoved in our faces.

3. The internet as the printing press and the American cultural divide as mid-millennium Europe's Protestant-Catholic divide. The internet and in in particular social networks have suddenly and inescapably forced on Americans the realization that there are people elsewhere in our own country with fundamentally different values than our own, and different ideas about the origins of our government's moral legitimacy. This is problematic, because humans really have only three ways of dealing with the "other": remain ignorant of them (which we no longer can), convert them, or decide that they are subhumans/gentiles/outlanders who are not worth converting (or to whom conversion can or should not apply). In mid-millennium central Europe, the printing press not only spread ideas but spread awareness of the people in the city next door who despise your moral authority and who might even try to force you to follow theirs. Even empires cannot comfortably or sustainably solve the disappearance of moral-authority silo walls; the Ottoman Empire had the unique solution of millets, but even this was uneasy and eventually collapsed. For a much more thorough treatment of aspects of the Thirty Years War analogy see Venkatesh Rao's essay.

4. The end of the Whig party and Trump as Zachary Taylor. Of course, part of this story must be the dramatic realignment of political coalitions occurring on both sides of the Atlantic, a shift similar to but more profound than the cultural-coalitional mismatch Nixon exploited in his Southern strategy. That realignment is the shift of cultural conservative blue collar whites into the GOP and the more surprising transformation of wealthy coastal professionals into Democrats. It's absurd to assume that a country of 320 million can be adequately represented by two political parties, and surely both major parties have their contradictions, but the GOP's tripolar values of God-country-market is far more explosive and has only been held together by the heavier-handed authoritarian style inherent to the right everywhere. In practice, those three values reduce to two values - respect for authority, and individual freedom - because God and country largely covary. Respect for authority versus protection of individual freedom further correlate closely with intelligence and education, and the basic cognitive divide that modern economies and elections expose are vexing for traditional coalitions of conservatives and liberals alike. (Odd, that educated liberals fight for entitlement programs that redistribute wealth to uneducated people to collect while they sit at home watching FOX.)

The analogy here is between the GOP and the Whigs, an American national party that died in the 1850s with an outsider President, driven by internal conflict over a question that exposed their divisions. When slavery was was forced to the center of national attention by the admission of southerly states after the Mexican War, the Whig coalition (of Northern industry-men and Southern plantation owners) disintegrated - having until that time been held together by their hatred of over-reaching Federal executive Andrew Jackson. As we are learning, a party that knows its values only in opposition to a hated enemy can rarely sustain itself. Mexican War general Zachary Taylor was a complete outsider to politics who was elected as the last Whig President. It might be mentioned here that if you count up the governors and members of Congress who came to their position with no history in politics, you'll notice that Republicans dramatically outnumber Democrats. The current President is only the most dramatic such example. For an expansion of this analogy see Gil Troy's essay.

5. Trump as Carter.  I won't belabor this one except that a) you can’t do much better than this essay by Julia Azari and b) pushing the analog probably too far, that would make Obama the Democratic Nixon, rather than the Reagan. Aside from the paranoid streak that was Nixon's undoing, this would not otherwise be an insult: both were tireless public servants and serious policy wonks, with pragmatic centrist styles. (Nixon a centrist you say? He established the EPA and laws protecting whales, removed the U.S. from the gold standard, and proposed national health insurance, which may today be as unbelievable as Obama defending the TPP may appear in a few decades.)

The Bad Stripe = "Greater Appalachia"

The Bad Stripe I've identified based on voting out of sync with the rest of the country and even the rest of their states, and a consistent cluster of low human development indicators - and it appears on Jayman's blog, more or less, as his Greater Appalachia. Is it because it's a boundary zone? Settled by Border Reivers?



Above: the yall zone, the border of which is basically the Bad Stripe. Note the correspondence with northern Greater Appalachia.

Polk, Truman, Eisenhower Are Most Unjustly Forgotten, Ford is Most Relatively Obscure U.S. President

1) Who is the most obscure president, adjusting for temporal distance? That is to say; Gerald Ford and Millard Fillmore are both obscure, but Fillmore's excuse is that he was in office 170 years ago. After 170 years will people remember Ford even less?

2) Presidents can be remembered for good or bad reasons. Unfortunately it seems easier to forget those who did a decent job. So when ranking obscurity against performance, who are the undeservedly forgotten presidents?


1. The Most Obscure President, Relative to Time Since Leaving Office

Results here are for presidents through Reagan. Here I assume obscure = least remembered = least discussed in print at a certain recent point in time. (We don't care that Zachary Taylor was discussed in 1849, of course he was, he was in office!) So I looked at Google Ngram mentions of the president's names in the year 2000. This means I excluded all presidents who did not complete their administration by that point (Obama, George W. Bush, and Clinton) and also excluded George H.W. Bush because of confusion with his son in the 2000 primary season. I included common variants of their names ("Chester A. Arthur" and "Chester Alan Arthur"; "JFK" especially may be overinflated by mentions of the airport.) I did not include nicknames (Tippecanoe, Ike, etc.) I consider Cleveland to have left office in 1897 (no special treatment due to non-consecutiveness.)

Once I had the number of Google Ngram mentions per president, I compared against how long they'd been out of office. Not surprisingly, the trend is that the longer you're out of office, the more obscure you are. For all of these graphs, Y-axis is remembrance (%Ngram mentionsx10,000), and X-axis is years out of office. (X-axis might be counter-intuitive; earlier presidents are on the RIGHT.)


It's reasonable to think that most of the forgetting occurs in the first couple decades; that is, from 1 year after they leave office to 21 years after they leave office, people will forget faster than from 101 years to 121 years. And indeed that's the case.




Above you can see the curve for (more recent) 20th century presidents, which is three times steeper (we forget the more recent ones faster) than the overall curve for all presidents. Also, the older group starting with John Quincy Adams through Cleveland is essentially flat. So, after they've been gone a century, we've basically forgotten whatever we're going to forget. (I started with John Quincy Adams to avoid inflation by Founding Fathers; those presidents were already well-known for their involvement with the Revolution and Constitution, and I want to learn about remembrance relating to what they did as president.)

Now we can look for presidents that are furthest off-trend from the curve. I modified the original curve from linear to a power function, which reflects the early forgetting trend better than a linear function.

Sure enough, relative to how long he's been out of office, Gerald Ford is the most obscure. He is furthest below the curve, on the lower left. Most presidents are in a sea of average-to-obscure just below the curve, starting with Coolidge as we go back. But there are plenty of more memorable outliers.

So who are the best-known, relative to the the time since they left office? FDR, LBJ, JFK (remember, airport signal), Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington. Honorable mentions are John Adams, James Madison and Andrew Jackson. What's interesting is that being famous before you're president (usually for being a war hero, but in one case being an actor) doesn't seem to matter for how well you're remembered, even if it helps you get elected. (Today do we talk about Grant the president, or Grant the general?)


2. How Are Presidents Remembered Relative to Performance? Who is Most Under-Rated?

My source for presidential performance is the Wikipedia article on ranking of the presidents; I averaged every survey they have in the scholar survey results. I convert the average of all the scores into a decimal between 0 to 1. 0 means everyone unanimously agreed he was the best president, 1 that he was terrible. These surveys span 1948 to 2015. The curve in the previous graph predicts how well-remembered they should be based on how long they've been out of office. For each, their distance above or below the curve is the relative remembrance. This compares the relative remembrance to their historical ranking. (For grins, I compared my own ranking against the historians and got an R^2 for 0.4527; there was general agreement except relative to historians, I really don't like John Adams and LBJ.)

As it turns out, there may be justice after all. The better the president, the more likely they are to be remembered. (Although it must be said, if the winners write history, this is also what we should expect to see.)

Looking at the two "unjust" quadrants (bad but remembered, or good but forgotten), let's focus on the good-but-forgotten; they're the ones we should be thinking more about, plus the good-but-forgotten stand out above the curve much more than the bad-but-remembered.

I circled the three most unjustly forgotten presidents. As I'd expected, Polk was a good but forgotten president (come on, click on that and read about him, he deserves it!) In particular, he explicitly set a number of ambitious foreign policy and domestic goals, and achieved them, prosecuting the Mexican War and expanding to the Pacific, settling the Oregon Territory question peacefully but to American advantage even against Victorian Britain, and establishing the forerunner to our modern treasury. (He would have been a very good candidate for futarchists!) Eisenhower and Truman are also standouts underrated by the attention we pay them.

Without the World Wars, Would the U.S. Have Played the Role of a Bigger Canada?

A good way to eclipse your economic competition is for their industrial centers to be flattened by wars twice, within a few decades, and for your own country to be on another continent entirely that is not directly involved in the war (excepting one attack). I've always been curious about the extent to which WWII could explain the eclipse of the UK's role as world police and bankers by the US. As I've traveled around the Commonwealth I can't help but imagine an alternative U.S.: a kinder, gentler, less exceptional Anglosphere nation that retained more of the isolationist flair of pre-WWII politics. If the Archduke had survived that summer day in 1914, and Europe had moved rationally and peacefully into an E.U. with Habsburgs...would not the U.K. have retained its economic, cultural and military dominance?

So I checked the numbers. Perhaps London would have remained the undisputed capital of the world for longer, but it's hard to ignore the already-evident economic trend that pre-dated the wars. In terms of the size of its economy (absolute GDP), the U.S. had already outgrown Britain by 1870. In terms of per capita income, the U.S. was neck and neck with the U.K. from shortly after the turn of the last cenutry until WWII, when it pulled away. The wars no doubt accelerated this process, in particular after WWII when there was an obvious incentive to move toward the American sphere and away from the Soviet, allowing international law and finance to move in discrete steps toward the U.S. But the underlying economic process was already underway. Now that China is eclipsing the U.S. as the absolute largest economy, we should expect that this process will repeat itself, particularly if the country escapes the middle income trap and the PCI of the interior rises as well.

New World, Non-Malthusian Population More Determined by Historical Accident Than Climate

Above: the Frontier Strip - the westernmost U.S. states before the Rockies - contain the 100th meridian (bold vertical line in maps) which is often used a marker of low precipitation and therefore low agricultural productivity. The argument has been that the population therefore drops off to the west of this; but if that's the case, then why does Canada not follow the same pattern?



It is commonly believed that the population drop-off seen in the United States at the 100th parallel has to do with changes in rainfall and agricultural productivity as one moves west in North America. This article shows that this is probably not the case. It more likely has to do with historical accident - about the time Americans had expanded west to the 100th meridian, we started building trains, and people could move to the more pleasant climates of the West Coast. Note that the "population distribution is by historical accident" theory applies more to the New World than the Old, because of the introduction of intensive agriculture and lack of a Malthusian limit. Maybe over time, there will be a smoother population gradient - it would be easier to argue that with thousands of years of agriculture, longer-term Malthusian limited populations in Asia and Africa populations do reflect agricultural productivity, and therefore also rainfall and longitude-degrees from ocean.

Presumably the same applies to latitude, although for different reasons. Very high latitudes are not great places to grow food. Latitude is still going to be affected by geography (if you're near coastline at 25 degrees latitude, life is much more pleasant than if you're inland) - but the solar radiation remains constant so the effect of latitude is a little less subject to being obscured by the details of geography than longitude would be. (Note that there may be constraints on population growth other than calories that I'm completely neglecting; e.g., maybe agriculture at the equator is better than 30 degrees, but disease slows population growth once you drop below the 30s.)



Geography junkies have likely already seen maps like the one above showing population by latitude, and the assumption is that agriculture just produces more calories at certain latitudes (similar to the provincial precipitation distribution that obtains in North America and which was assumed to influence our own population distribution). But if we're trying to pull out first principles, absolute population doesn't help much - what if there's just a lot of land at certain latitudes? That doesn't tell us whether that latitude is good for agriculture and therefore modern humans, it tells us where the land is on Earth's surface. If your denominator for population density includes ocean, then it doesn't really tell us anything about the carrying capacity of land at that latitude. So population alone won't work - it needs to be population density.

And even just population density per latitude won't work - it has to be population density per actual land area found at that latitude. I couldn't find population density per land area data. Fortunately this Brookings Institute Paper quotes World Bank 1997 figures for land area and population in bands of 10 degrees latitude (see pp 49-51), and I back-calculated population density per actual land area at this level of granularity.



Thinking it might be interesting to see how things stack up when the northern and southern latitude bands are combined, I did so:



(There wasn't full data below 40s south or above 50s north, which means we can't even do 50s when we combine them, which non-ideally eliminates most of Europe.) The question that emerges is, what's wrong with you people in the 30s and 40s south? Up here on the correct side of the world we certainly seem to be able to get along alright in those latitudes. The lion's share of the land in the 30s and 40s south is to be found in the southern half of Australia, most of Argentina and Chile, and South Africa. These aren't bad places to live - note that this contains 3 of the world's 5 Mediterranean climate zones! Again, even trying to smooth things out, historical details matter. These are places where intensive agriculture was only introduced in the last few centuries by Europeans. And geographical details matter, even after using population density instead of population - Australia is an ancient craton with terrible soil, and Argentina is drier than it might otherwise be due to the rainshadow of the Andes. That said, in the Malthusian future, we should expect to see the Pampas filling up much like another Mediterranean climate zone (California) is filling up as we speak.

Finally, it's worth glancing at Malthusian long-term intensive agriculture countries, to see whether this holds up. I've put population density, precipitation and elevation next to each other. China's marked parallels are 40-30-20. India's are just 30-20. (10 crosses near the southern tip of the subcontinent.)





The precipitation relationship holds up better for India than for China, but both of them follow elevation. This may be more true in rice-farming areas than other grains. The relationship of population to elevation has been profitably studied elsewhere; there's a notable outgroup in the central Mexican plateau, where grains that enjoy dry conditions are grown and near to where agriculture began in North America.

Fully stated then, the theory can then be summarized as "Population distribution is strongly influenced by agriculture which in turn is determined by climate and therefore latitude, but a) until Malthusian limits are reached millennia after the introduction of intensive agriculture, distribution will be mostly by historical accident as in the New World and b) precipitation and especially elevation dramatically affect the distribution as well."

Examples of Antiquity's Influence on American Founders

Of many, here are two of recent interest:

1) Gibbon's pointing to the increasing power of the Praetorian Guard in the Roman Empire leading to its decline. You might say this is a particularly virulent case of the kinds of special interests internally distorting the priorities of an empire (or over-reactions to those interests), like eunuchs in Ming China or the shepherd lobby in colonial era Spain; particularly virulent, because when the lobby is the people who know how to kill people, their demands are more difficult to ignore, resulting in few natural deaths for emperors.

2) The recognition by both Gibbon and Machiavelli that there may have been a connection, fortuitous though it was, between non-violent succession during the non-inherited Five Good Emperors period, and the prosperity at that time in Rome; hence the installation of regular peaceful power transfers. Good institutions are indeed important.


Relating to #2 above, I would have liked to find some quantitative work with nice graphs on the damage to the Roman economy by civil unrest or governmental inefficiency during turnover/civil wars, but I couldn't find any; there's this article by Bruce Bartlett which is mostly about the damage done by the Roman deep state (deep for that time). Suffice it to say, the Julio-Claudian dynasty marked a period of stability after the civil war between Augustus and Antony, the Five Emperors were a period of peaceful succession, and the Crisis of the Third Century was the opposite. (Note how Bartlett is gunning for the deep state and he skips the Crisis entirely.) Economies grow when credit and capital are available, which requires the world to be predictable. (In other words: risk is okay as long as it can be evaluated.) The Pax Romana and Mongolica are good examples of this; civil wars are obviously bad, but expropriation/nationalization events by otherwise stable states can do just as much damage, because they concentrate the unpredictability in the safety of capital.

Wealth and Coastline, Part 2: The United States

Previously I showed that the average income in the set of 138 countries for which I had income data, countries that do have some saltwater coastline is $13,562, vs $9,040 for those with no coastline. This is not surprising, to the extent that you'd expect places with globally linked economies established by their historical presence on the seas to do well, as you would expect for places that were non-extractively colonized (they'll often be the same places, i.e. the U.S.) So it might be worth asking, is there a similar effect in the U.S.?

Yes. In general, the coastal states have higher per capita incomes than the landlocked states. But the scatter plot is interesting. There's a U-shaped trend to this data, of distance of each state capital from American saltwater, versus per capita income (U.S. Census). I say "American saltwater" because there are two states (New Mexico and Arizona) where it's faster to go to the Gulf of California. Even including that as the closest saltwater doesn't change much.



You notice the income minimum at 607 miles from saltwater? It's not just a curve artifact - if you look at the states with capitals 500-700 miles from saltwater, they have a lower per capita among them ($24,141) vs the country as a whole ($28,051). These 7 states with capitals 500-700 miles are the sparsely populated and therefore small service economies of the northern Rockies (Utah, Montana, Idaho), as well as part of the Bad Stripe in the Appalachians (Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana), and post-industrial Michigan. Is there something worse about being 600 miles from the sea, as opposed 1000 or more? (6 states: Iowa, Colorado, Wyoming, Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota, the latter the furthest at 1,235 miles.) But it's possible that it's just a historical accident, as with the supposed effect of rainfall at 100 degrees west longitude causing the population to drop off toward the west. In the case of 100 degrees west, Americans had settled to about that distance inland when the rail lines were completed. (Read the history of towns in western Texas and you will usually see a discussion of which rail line it was on; true for most of the Frontier Strip.)

Also of note: I used driving distance to saltwater, but this is not a great approximation. Even if we were going to use driving distance to saltwater regardless of country, you couldn't include Hudson Bay as North Dakota's closest, because you can't drive there! And just because you can drive to coastline doesn't mean there's a port there, or geography that allows ports to be built. Furthermore, the Great Lakes states are de facto on saltwater because canals and locks connect shipping all the way through to Minnesota.

If you count states in the discrete category of whether they're landlocked and how landlocked they are (1 state away from saltwater? 2 states?) it's clear that the median income of saltwater states is higher - $29,551 vs $26,073. However, among the landlocked states, the U-shaped curve appears again: for the land-locked states, there's no trend for more isolated = lower income; if anything it's the opposite (isolated means the more states you have to go through to get to saltwater from there). The only state 4 states away from Saltwater is Minnesota which at 30,656 has a higher PCI than the median of the coastal states., the better its income. (1 state away, $25,275; 2 states away, $26,695; 3 states away, $26,545.)

Map of the U.S. With Literal Place Names

I was surprised that they went out on a limb for Arizona, which doesn't really have an accepted etymology. But Saint Heelholder for San Diego is specific enough that I'm going to have to look that up. There's a full map but to see it you have to go the creators' site. (And here's a map of a 124-state U.S.)

Sincerely,

Your blogger, God-like Cat-Valley

Why Is the Frontier Strip Where It Is

Summary: Climate continues to have a profound impact on the distribution and economic activities of humans. There is a rapid population density decrease in the Frontier Strip states. Moving westward, there is a sharp increase in population when the Pacific coast is reached. This is usually attributed to difficulty of farming in the country's interior as the 100 W meridian is approached. I show here that this is not consistent with current agricultural productiveness of Frontier Strip and Pacific states on a per person or per area basis. I also show that in the Frontier Strip, temperature, precipitation and latitude are poor predictors of agricultural output but strong predictors of population density. Population density and agricultural output do not predict each other.

Since the 100 W theory of population density drop-off appears falsified, other explanations must be sought. The appearance of easier transportation during the settlement of the Frontier Strip, as well as the depression are explored and discarded. Further research with better agricultural output data and higher resolution climate data may support the hypothesis that investments in agricultural capital came too early in the Frontier Strip to benefit from irrigation technology, and that modern transportation and U.S. population preferences of climate as well as the coastal location of large population centers with service economies combine to keep the Frontier Strip the low-population boundary of the U.S. interior.



PART 1. I've written enough about the Bad Stripe recently so I thought I'd move to another grouping of U.S. states: the Frontier Strip. The Frontier Strip is the north-south line of states including the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, identified retrospectively in the 1890 census as having been the frontier in 1880. I've been interested in the idea ever since I visited Scottsbluff, Nebraska on a road trip two years ago. Like many places in the High Plains, Scottsbluff is proud of its pioneer heritage, although you have to ask how proud you want to be of being famous for being on the way to somewhere else. Inspection of a population density map of the U.S. shows that there is a dramatic drop-off as you move west across the Frontier Strip states, which never "recovers" until you hit the coastal cities of Washington, Oregon and California. The precipitation map is underneath it for comparison.

The geographers' conventional wisdom on this phenomenon involves the hundredth meridian west, which I've drawn in as a black stripe. It does seem to track just to the west of the density drop-off. The argument is that precipitation drops off to the west of this area, so agriculture becomes less productive. In earlier times economies were more strongly dependent on agriculture; consequently, large cities would not tend to develop in these dry regions and, even if they did, could not be supplied with food. Therefore further settlement coming from the East passed these areas and continued to the (contiguous) Pacific coast states. This argument also assumes that the potential agricultural productivity of an area has been realized by settlement and farming, i.e. it is at steady-state, and North Dakota's population isn't about to explode due to settlement by new farmers.

I've always found this argument dubious. First of all, most of these assumptions are not addressed explicitly in discussions of the 100 W boundary. But the most direct thing to do would be to look at agricultural output and see how it stacks up by state. Because states differ in population and size, we should look at output per person and per area. This information comes from the 2010 Census. There is not an obvious unit of "agricultural output" (if we include tobacco, none of the Frontier Strip or Pacific states will do very well) so I used combined receipts for the four principal products that the Census tracks by state (beef cattle, dairy products, corn and broiler chickens). Yes, wheat is an obvious omission but I couldn't find data for it by state, so it's possible these numbers are off by virtue of neglecting important crops.

So, if we have cause to doubt the traditional 100 W explanation, the Frontier Strip states should do the same or better than the Pacific states in agricultural output, meaning that it's not such a farm productivity death sentence to be near 100 W. Here's how the Frontier states and Pacific states stack up when ordered by agricultural value produced per-person.

State	Ag $/person
Nebraska	6,040
South Dakota	3,954
Kansas	2,846
North Dakota	2,091
Oklahoma	890
Oregon	590
Texas	451
Washington	286
Arizona	233
California	229

(I include Arizona because I'll use it later as an example.)

Before we get excited and declare 100 W theory dead, it should be noted that the above table probably isn't that interesting. We're looking at 2010 data, and even if California really is more productive than the Frontier states (as the traditional theory predicts), it might be masked in this table: states with large populations are likely to have higher proportions of people in other sectors, i.e. doing something other than agriculture. What really counts is the potential productivity of the land itself (owing to climate); that's the crux of the argument. So here's how they stack up when look at agricultural value produced per land area:

State	Ag $/Area
Nebraska	55,405
Kansas	38,319
California	21,154
Oklahoma	18,765
Texas	16,698
South Dakota	16,364
Washington	11,128
Oregon	9,080
North Dakota	7,598
Arizona	5,059

This doesn't look good for the 100 W theory. Yes, California is productive per land area, but still, if you're in Nebraska or Kansas, why go west? You're better off in the High Plains! There are possible explanations for this, besides the limited four-product index I'm using: a) The farming business has changed a lot over the past century and a half, and what used to be family-owned farms are now gigantic industrial facilities. So what makes Nebraska so productive now might not matter to people economically today (if it's all going to one or two corporations) or it might be different from conditions a century ago. b) You could also make the argument that dollars produced per area is a weak proxy indicator, because the land isn't being used for valuable crops, because the value of crops has changed over time, or (least likely) the areas haven't reached steady state and are still being developed by settlers agriculturally.


Additional point: agricultural productivity cannot depend entirely on precipitation, i.e. on proximity to 100 W. Length of growing season has something to do with it as well, which as you might guess has a strong north-south trend. This map shows number of days below freezing:

That map is a little small so, if we can assume 1911 was typical, here's a larger map showing basically the same thing, the day of the last killing frost:



As it turns out, there is a north-south population density trend in the Frontier Strip. Looking further north to Canada, any semblance of a 100 W-population boundary disappears. In fact the population density along the country's southern border increases beyond 100 W, after having dropped off in Ontario well to the east. Again, black line is 100 W.

You might make several arguments to explain this: 1) The 100W boundary is in fact country-specific, due to different development policies, and/or 2) that as latitude increases, the strength of the association of precipitation becomes relatively weaker and latitude becomes stronger. (Who cares about number of days below freezing when you go from 30 to 50? Precipitation makes a bigger difference. But when you go from 120 to 140, latitude makes a bigger difference.) 3) The western part of Ontario isn't yet at steady state and its population will growin the future when settlers arrive to realize its agricultural potential, and the precipitation-driven east-west density gradient will assert itself.

Rather than speculate, I did linear regressions on the Frontier Strip and Frontier plus Pacific and Arizona, using latitude, rainfall (not including snow), days below freezing, average annual temperature, lowest average monthly low, highest average monthly high, and population density, and their correlation to agricultural dollars per area. Rather than take up space with a bunch of ugly scatter plots I made a table of R^2 values. This is exploratory so there's no fancy Bonferroni corrections going on, but in any event none are strong correlations.

	All	Frontier
Latitude	0.0077	0.0039
Rainfall	0.0205	0.1513
Frz Days	0.0986	0.0014
Ave Temp	0.0216	0.0003
Lowest Mnth Lo	0.1123	0.0004
Highest Mnth Hi	0.0006	0
Pop Dens	0.0358	0.0125

Since agricultural output is just a proxy for the original question we're concerned with (population density), I used that as the output and looked at the same factors. Wow. The R's are much stronger.

	All	Frontier
Latitude	0.1355	0.9463
Rainfall	0.0484	0.4844
Frz Days	0.5628	0.9773
Ave Temp	0.2918	0.9475
Lowest Mnth Lo	0.6001	0.9577
Highest Mnth Hi	0.0117	0.8587
Ag Output/Area	0.0358	0.0125

First: agricultural output and population density do not seem to be strongly related. Furthermore if rainfall is the reason 100 W is significant, it's interesting that rainfall is a much weaker predictor than temperature. These are both problems for the traditional 100 W theory.

Second, for the "inputs" with R's above 0.9, here's what they mean in terms of population density.

- For every day of the year where the temperature drops below freezing, the population density is lower by 0.197 people per square kilometer.

- For every degree lower the lowest monthly low is, the population density is lower by 0.863.

- For every degree the average annual temperature drops, the population density drops by 1.33.

- For every degree of latitude gained, the population density drops by 2.05.

It seems strange that there could be such a strong connection between climate and population but not agricultural output, especially in states where a huge fraction of the economy depends on agriculture. That connection could very well be concealed here by the limited set of agricultural products I'm considering. Really, what I should be using is climate and agriculture output data at the county level, and the agriculture data should be the value of all commercial livestock and crops. But I leave that to someone with access to real data and real software. It would also be interesting to crunch these numbers for every decade from 1850, and see how the R's and slopes for each of these change over time if at all. Maybe the weak predictiveness between climate factors and agricultural output is real, but it used to be much stronger.


PART 2. Other Possible Explanations

Explanation #1. The population drop-off is a result of timing, i.e. improvements in transportation and communication. Couldn't it just be that just as the Frontier Strip was getting settled, trains and telegraph lines were built? Finally, you could find out whether there were jobs in San Francisco, and you could get there. (Assuming that independent of mineral extraction revenues*, loss of population is equivalent to loss of economic growth, this is the root of productivity paradoxes that exist between areas with free movement of people and goods.

If this were the case, you would expect to see a shift westward from the Frontier Strip at least by the 1880s. The Transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 and it was connected to Los Angeles in 1876. In fact this is not what we see. First, here are the population densities of all Frontier Strip states and Pacific coast states, and then the average density of both groups.

After the 1920s, the Pacific states never looked back. Among the Frontier states, Texas is by far the strongest performer, owing probably to a longer growing season, early discovery of mineral wealth, and ports to make transportation cheaper (though I suspect immigration from Mexico is also a contributor there; Texas Hispanics are 35.9% of the population, compared to 6.1% in neighboring Oklahoma and comparable or lower northward.) Furthermore, you can see there was a local optimum in every Frontier state except Texas sometime in the teens. I don't know of any events that would explain this drop, nor if people were heading further west. Bottom line, the fact that the drop happened so late argues against the railroads having been the contributor, and the roads weren't yet developed enough that cars could have been the explanation.

Initially I was also skeptical because of Arizona. Arizona is clearly not a state blessed with rainfall, and yet it had (and still has) a strong citrus growing industry (thanks to irrigation), and its population density passed the Frontier Strip's in the 1980s and is still growing. It's worth asking why irrigation doesn't also cause a sudden increase in the relatively wetter Frontier Strip's population; climate and sunshine preference are likely to play a part, and we could make a guess based on sources of internal immigration for Arizona. This would suggest that in some ways, transportation and information about local conditions do make a difference, but the precondition is that the area can't have been settled prior to modern irrigation technology (because capital commitments are made in the agricultural infrastructure), and it has to have sunlight. I think that the real explanation will have something to do with the random impact of the historical timing of technological progress, if not transportation, then commitment to pre-existing agricultural infrastructure, shifting of economic importance to other sectors, and population preferences that make a greater difference in more recent history due to increased mobility.

Explanation #2. The Okie Effect. Can farm abandonment and consolidation during the Depression and Dustbowl explain it? See graphs above. These economic/agricultural events may have contributed but the trend was already underway at least a decade earlier.

*I give the caveat about mineral wealth because Texas and to a lesser extent Oklahoma have big oil sectors that impact their populations. In addition, most of North Dakota's counties are losing population and the state is just barely growing but recent oil discoveries have made the state profitable. Research suggestion: to what degree can sub-national entities be subject to the resource curse? What institutions or cultural features are protective against resource-curse type damage to economies?