There had been some discussion around here a week or two ago about State GDP, so I thought I’d post a link to this recent Urbanophile post that discusses some recent numbers with handy maps.
All is not well most places, really, but because we’re occasionally asked to emulate labor practices of the South because that region is supposedly doing better than the rest of the country, I wanted to note that the South doesn’t appear to be doing notably better than other places and, some parts of the South by some measurements are doing worse:
Some of the fast growing Sun Belt states added people at a faster rate than they grew economic output. Georgia in particular is worth noting, because even metro Atlanta has been showing declining real per capita GDP. In fact, Georgia actually declined by more than Michigan did on this metric, so obviously all is not well down there. Texas, despite its vaunted jobs engine, is expanding almost totally horizontally. It is 9th lowest in the US on real per capita GDP growth, with a nearly flat 2% performance over the last decade.
(emphasis added).
Right to work laws are as much a Western as a Southern phenomenon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
The Georgia per capita numbers are being thrown off by retirees. The Texas numbers are being thrown off by illegals.
Regarding Texas, I work in the energy business, and Houston is our Mecca. What is interesting is that we can’t get people to come to the Chicago area from down there. We’ve got a $3.8 billion expansion going on here, the biggest project ever to be excecuted in a working refinery anywhere in the world ever, and we have trouble recruiting. People look at the increased costs of living up here compared to down there and don’t want to move.
So don’t discount how the cost of living feeds into those per capita numbers. It may very well be that people in the South make less money pre-tax, but have far better lifestyles.