This is such a profoundly useless sentiment. What's the point of spreading the "Southerners are backwards" meme except to win some feeling of self-satisfied collective superiority?

You're ignoring the fact that investment has been plainly beneficial everywhere in the south. From land grant universities and TVA electrification to NASA in Huntsville and St Jude in Memphis, it's pretty clear that southerners don't just choose to "leave themselves behind" when given resources.

I think the point is they frequently vote against their own interests. For just one example, one need only look at the Kansas experiment to see what unchecked conservative tax policy can do to a state.

It was not an attempt to spread a meme or feel a sense of superiority.

My comment was an observation of a cultural difference that is not even really confined to the south. It’s more about rural and urban differences. I can only speak about the south because it is what I have experienced.

A culture that is at its root regressive, anti-science and anti-intellectual should not be surprised when it does not succeed in a modern world.

I can assure you that the children living in these communities didn't. I'd even be willing to bet that a good chunk of the policies keeping these places behind were inked and dried before their parents could vote.

So, as much fun as it is to blame these people for their own woes it is neither productive nor accurate.

The children didn't, but their parents did nothing to fix the problem and in most cases voted to continue to pass these same problems on to their children. Public school is scary-bad because them damn liberals are teaching our children to think and those judges prevent us from force-feeding our preferred cultural indoctrination, so let's starve the schools in the guise of cutting taxes and promoting "choice." Then let's all act surprised when our children get a shit education, when they lack qualifications/skills for jobs and continuing education, and businesses have to expand elsewhere to find an educated workforce. Then we can blame the failure upon the schools, greedy teachers unions, and administrative "bloat" and not admit to our own greed and short-sightedness. Of course the children of the elite will do just fine in private school, where they will get an education that might, almost, be as good as what any kid in Minnesota gets from public school.

When I was a midwestern public school kid of the 70s and 80s, Kansas was on par with the rest of the midwest in terms of general public education. After Brownback and his ilk have finished raping the state anyone with a child under the age of 14 should probably consider moving to a another state for the sake of their own child's future. This is not a problem that goes back generations, and the cause and solution are blatantly obvious.

Seriously, the one word response to your attempt to absolve them of any agency or responsibility for this situation is "Kansas."

Imagine that people who were not raised to value education don’t value education and pass that terrible attitude to the next generation.

We can accept it’s a crappy cycle that won’t change without external inputs or we can mock them to make ourselves feel better.

Could you be more specific? (what policies were implemented, who implemented them, and how did they affect the polulation?)

No I cannot. Not being an economist I can't point to exactly what is causing this to happen. I can, however, talk about my theory on what causes it. More or less it boils down to education. In a lot of rural communities the school systems are one step above garbage and have been for generations. This feeds back into declining tax revenues (because education tends to lead to higher paying jobs) which feeds back into worse schools.

But that's just gut feeling.

Can you expand on that?

Southern, lower-middle to lower class, white southerners have voted against their own interests since the moment the Civil War ended.