SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to horrified visitors

Re:SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to... by dionidium on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @12:01AM (#16271473)

Do you spend much time on Hacker News? Such opinions are expressed here regularly. More seriously, it's not unusual to see, say, Florida casually compared to, say, Eastern Europe without any sense of how absurdly one-sided such comparisons actually are (e.g. on measures like GDP, standard of living, number of jobs, etc).

Opinions are opinions. That's fine. But what I find as a Missourian living in NYC is that people on the coasts (who didn't move there from somewhere else) are largely ignorant of important factual properties of the South and the Midwest. It's not uncommon to see someone off by an order of magnitude about, say, GDP or population or whatever (expressed with extreme confidence, of course).

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Re:SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to... by dylanh on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @12:10AM (#16271526)

I'm from Florida -- and have deep roots going back more than 100 years.

Florida is significantly less developed than it has any right to be, on a range of measures.

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Re:SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to... by dionidium on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @12:23AM (#16271609)

Yes, that's right. It's well into the bottom half of U.S. states by GDP per capita, which still puts it at around 4-5x the GDP per capita in most Eastern European countries (which was my point).

The United States is ridiculously wealthy, even in places Americans love to denigrate. That's worth remembering whenever you feel like comparing Florida unfavorably to this or that other place.

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Re:SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to... by maym86 on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @12:01PM (#16275331)

GDP isn't really a great measure of how well a population is doing if inequality is high and wages are stagnant for low paid workers.

Florida has one of the highest levels of inequality in the US and the US in general had more inequality than most European countries.

Are the working poor in the south really that much better off than most of Europe where healthcare and social housing are more readily available? GDP alone is a bad measure of success for individuals living somewhere if the benefits are not shared.

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Re:SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to... by jtmcmc on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @12:46AM (#16271748)

I think many of the people that live in major coastal cities that have extremely negative opinions of the rest of the country often lived in those places prior to moving there.

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