What I see, is that the intellectual floor for high-quality employment that results in traditional middle-class security continues to rise. In my grandfather's generation, somebody who could chew gum and walk at the same time could get a decent union industrial job and live the proverbial "two cars and a picket fence" lifestyle. In my father's generation, you had to at least graduate high school, and odds are, you needed your wife to work as well. In my generation, a college degree is table-stakes, and really, you need a degree from one of the places that has more legitimacy, and really, a degree in one of the harder, more intellectually demanding subjects. Roughly, at every generation here, I'm approximating the floor of intelligence and ability to increase at around one standard deviation.

> The median standard of living in Appalachia is higher than that of Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Italy.

Fuck, that's bad news for Europe, I suppose. I knew people that had dirt floors and no indoor plumbing.

> I knew people that had dirt floors and no indoor plumbing

That isn't a very strong data point. The median household income in Appalachia - which also includes eg Pittsburgh - is above all but a dozen or so major nations, and is above that of the EU and Eurozone. The unemployment rate there is also lower than the EU and Eurozone (in fact, it's about ~45% lower).

Including Pittsburgh in Appalachia is being very generous. You're way too far west there.

Unemployment numbers are mostly bullshit, to boot. Depending on which set of them you are using, that can have huge discrepancies with the actual labor force numbers percentages, since after so many months of a hopeless situation, people drop off the unemployment rolls and into the masses of the long-term unemployed.

It's like you're dangling a pinata and yanking it away at the last second. If you want to talk about your particular backwoods place, name it with greater specificity. If you want us to focus on labor force participation rates vice unemployment stats, offering those up would be similarly wise.

For the record, my Appalachia town also had good schools, though we had more than our fair share of meth and poverty as well.

>For the record, my Appalachia town also had good schools, though we had more than our fair share of meth and poverty as well.

Good on you. We had the poverty, although weed was the favorite cash crop, rather than meth. Growing some plants out in the woods is easier to hide than a lab that might blow up and catch the double-wide on fire...

This discussion reminds me of http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?midwest

Well, when comparing Appalachia with some countries, does that include HDI? Some of those "poorer" states might be welfare states that don't have the "benefit" of some large US corporation being located there and skewing statistics.

> The median standard of living in Appalachia is higher than that of Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Russia, China, Latin America, and so on.

Care to give a reference?