Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Fiscal Condition of the States

You can go to this site for the 4 sub-charts, and one overall summary chart, of the fiscal conditions of the 50 states.

Utah does OK: two rankings of 5th, an 11th, and a 20th, for an overall ranking of 11th.

What are the worst states? New York, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

Do keep in mind that this was produced by the Mercatus Center. This is an offshoot of the economics department at George Mason University. This department is known for being libertarian/conservative.

In doing rankings like this, it’s possible to show that the numbers, by themselves, are meaningless. It’s a degrees of freedom problem: there aren’t enough observations to actually estimate the summaries produced. So, instead, the authors have to input their own weights (they may try to be unbiased). Critics may say that their biases are showing, and they have a reasonable position (although their biases may be showing too).

I tend to agree with stuff put out by the Mercatus Center, but you don’t have to.

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