In light of President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union speech, POLITICO Magazine recently released its own “The States of Our Union,” an annual statistic-based report ranking all fifty states plus the District of Columbia from best to worst. This year, Louisiana beat Mississippi as the absolute worst of all.
According to the magazine, the list is based on 14 existing rankings from sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI. The rankings compiled annual per capita income, homeownership and unemployment rates, percentage of citizens below the poverty line, high school graduation rates, life expectancy at birth and infant deaths. Factors such as high poverty and unemployment rates determine a bad ranking, while high numbers in categories such as income and education determine a good ranking.
Mass communication sophomore and Louisiana native Hope Wilkins said she was shocked to hear the ranking. She argued that, culturally, Louisiana is actually the best state to live in.
She said that, while numbers are important, it is unfair to judge the state solely on that because it does not give “the whole story.”
“But if you come down here and talk to the people that live here and lived here through all the hardships – Katrina, everything – people don’t look at it like that,” Wilkins said. “People don’t live here thinking, ‘Ugh, what an awful place.’”
In 2014 Harvard University and University of British Columbia researchers worked with the Wall Street Journal’s business website, MarketWatch, to list the top happiest cities in the country and rated Louisiana much differently that POLITCO. The top five happiest cities in the United States were all in Louisiana. They are (in order from first to fifth): Lafayette, Houma, Shreveport, Baton Rouge and Alexandria.
Mass communication freshman Lacy Jones was not surprised by POLITICO’s ranking. She said that Louisiana is “pretty bad” in terms of education and jobs, but she still disagrees with the ranking.
“Because we try. I mean, we’re not going to be the best. However, we do try,” she said.
When she heard New Hampshire ranked no. 1 on the list, Jones expressed a much firmer disagreement with the rankings.
“I know where New Hampshire is, but I don’t really hear anything about New Hampshire ever,” Jones said.
Forbes Magazine placed Louisiana 40th in its 2015 list of best and worst states for business and ranked at the very bottom of the 2012 Camelot Index, which Governing.com called the “grandaddy of all state rankings.”
Louisiana was even recently named the fourth sluttiest state by Mandatory.com, an online magazine which took statistics from the CDC.
Communications disorders freshman Maggie Bergeron, from Houma, said she was disappointed to hear the most recent ranking. At the same time, she could not think of any state that would rank as the worst.
“I don’t think we’re the worst,” Bergeron said. “I don’t want to say who’s the worst. That’s kind of offensive to anybody.”