I gathered some data on US states. This is not longitudinal yet, but I still think it has some interesting trends.
To start, states which vote more democratically have the following trends:
- more bachelor’s degrees
- higher incomes both before and after taxes
- live longer
- more people have health insurance.
- Fewer people smoke tobacco.
The one downside is that the cost of living is higher, and housing is more expensive on average.
If you are trying to minimize your taxes, random forest regressors fail to give a robust predictive model for the total tax rate, with an R squared of only 1%, which is no explanation. This includes presidential results for the last three elections and the partisan voting index! Still, tax rates are fairly uniform and not explained by partisan affiliation, no matter how I try to torture my data.
The biggest correlate of living longer is higher home prices, and vice versa. Increasing longevity reduces house turnover, reducing available housing stock and increasing prices. So, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, if you want lower housing prices, kill grandma!
Or you can build more housing…
Long lives, higher incomes, high home prices, and bachelor’s degrees are strongly correlated.
| Life expectancy | Median household income | Bachelor’s degree | Biden vote 2020 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Life expectancy | 1.000000 | 0.752675 | 0.598726 | 0.541611 |
| Median household income | 0.752675 | 1.000000 | 0.848154 | 0.727764 |
| Bachelor’s degree | 0.598726 | 0.848154 | 1.000000 | 0.826395 |
| Biden vote 2020 | 0.541611 | 0.727764 | 0.826395 | 1.000000 |
The relationship between bachelor’s degrees and incomes is the strongest correlation in my dataset.
An interesting finding is that increasing school funding does not lead to better SAT Math scores. The strongest correlate is a slower population growth rate as education funding increases. Neither does school funding correlate to tax rates as strongly as it correlates to lower population growth. This is worth further exploration. It also does not correlate with partisan affiliation.
States with more smokers lean Republican and have lower incomes.
Nothing in my dataset strongly correlates with SAT math scores.
In conclusion…
- Simply increasing funding for a program will not necessarily lead to better results. Emphasize quality of government more than increasing funding, at least most of the time. Pumping more money into an inefficient system will not lead to better results.
- Throwing more money at a problem like police or increasing border restrictions haphazardly works as well as spending money on education or fighting climate change without considering the efficiency of how the money will be spent.
- Tax rates in the ranges we see in the US today have a minimal impact on quality of life.
- Higher education matters.
- Smoking kills.
- Keep people in school, which leads to lower poverty and higher incomes, which leads to less smoking, which leads to longer lives.
Sources:
| Housing cost | https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/housing-costs-by-state |
| other data | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_socioeconomic_factors |
| Education | https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state |
| State tax levels | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_tax_levels_in_the_United_States |
| tobacco | https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/smoking-rates-by-state |