121–130 of 249 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The thing is, Utah has never had a truly poor population. What about when the first destitute pioneers arrived and found a desert?
It's not really meaningful to describe people as "rich" or "poor" in the absence of an economy.
> For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place. I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, because economic data suggest that modest Salt Lake City, population 192,672, does something that the rest of us seem to be struggling with: It helps people move upward from poverty. By this criterion, should Salt Lake City be so weird to a New Yorker? Upward M…
Conjecture: the number one driver of a city's upward mobility is fraction of foreign-born population. Poor foreigners move to US with few skills, and then their children do fine. Note that this mechanism has nothing to do with the differences between social services in different cities. Let's check: Out of the 50 largest cities, here are where those high-mobility cities rank by percentage foreign-born. 3. San Jose 38…
Go ahead and visit Salt Lake (I am comparing to Colorado). I think they either don't have the money or out of principle do not maintain their roads. That's the economy. The geography is not favorable either. Salt Lake sits in a bowl surrounded by dark hills with little vegetation. The hills are all dug by mines and open pits. They have the whole range ("on the other side") that is essentially one big mine. The winter…
Utah is also home to some of Congress' most anti-Trump members. Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Mia Love, among others.
At the 2016 GOP convention, the Utah delegation was one of the groups trying to overthrow Trump's nomination (along with Colorado's delegation). They failed, of course, but Sen. Lee was instrumental in getting those efforts off the ground.
Almost as if a broad generalization isn't an accurate picture...
I often think of the way the Mormon church works as a distributed system, and the way it operates is not unlike most open source software. It works because everyone knows their role, is dedicated, and willing to sacrifice.
In the ward (congregation) I'm in now I teach the fourteen-year-olds on Sunday. My wife teaches the 16-year-old girls in the third hour of church. In our last ward I was the eleven-year-old boy scout leader, and would take one night a week to teach them self sufficiently, how to camp and fish and hunt, knot tying, etc. We'd also go camping four times per year.
Both my wife and I fast (don't eat) one day/month and donate what we would have spent on food (in reality a lot more) to the poor. We also donate 10% of our income to the church, a lot of which goes to the poor. We feed the Mormon missionaries once a month (we did so last night; one grew up as a refugee in Kenya, the other grew up in the Philippines). My wife and I each served a mission (me - Ukraine for two years, her - Lima, Peru for 18 months).
The organization is what makes it work, and is really top notch. If there's an emergency we know exactly what our role is. When we come across someone who is struggling we know exactly what to do. There are volunteers assigned to be employment specialists, to help with food, over shelter, educational resources, funds earmarked, etc. (For both members and non-members). Every once in a while calls for extra funds or materials come out during a natural disaster or refugee influx, though most of the time those are stockpiled and ready to ship long in advance.
There are weekly leadership meetings where needs of the people in our area (mostly concerned with members, but we'll discuss on-members as well), and each member is supposed to have an in-person visit each month to make sure they're not doing OK. I'm assigned three families, and if anything is wrong we report back and it's taken care of. In my teens I volunteered once a month teaching in a prison and once a quarter helping out in a nursing home.
Growing up we served on the church farm, my parents frequently volunteered at the canning facility, and we took people into our home that were struggling to get by.
There are a lot of problems within the Church, and things we need to work on and fix. But, I think, as an efficient caregiving and charitable institution, there are few in the world that rival it.
As a Utahn, the most disappointing thing about this article is the racial homogeny. It's true - nearly everyone is white. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some diversity. When my father was a Mormon bishop, he would dole out orders for the Bishop's Storehouse to everyone just the same, whether they were white, black, Latino, or Asian - Made no difference to him. They got the same food, but also had to live by t…
Iirc Matz (of Ruby) is Mormon. I've always wondered what the Mormon roots are like outside of the continental US and how they took hold and continue to be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Spearman rank correlation of your two sets is 61% (after dropping cities that are not common to both). https://gist.github.com/hughdbrown/94016d0f477b855a893514131... Sadly, Salt Lake City is dropped from the set because of the missing foreign-born data.
Cool, thanks! If we were to dramatically over-simplify by assuming a city's economic mobility is a simple sum of independent Gaussian variables, is the following correct? (1) Pearson and Spearman rank correlation are the same. (2) Percentage foreign born is more important than all other variables combined (since they would contribute 39% of the total variance)
I don't know what this means -- like you'd get the same value if you calculated the correlation by Pearson correlation and Spearman rank correlation?
Or are you saying there is something called the Pearson rank correlation and asking how it relates to Spearman rank correlation? I have no knowledge of a Pearson rank correlation.
I used Spearman rank correlation because it is applicable to this situation: it "assesses how well the relationship between two variables can be described using a monotonic function." [1] Pearson's correlation would be appropriate if I was looking for a linear relationship between two numerical values, which I don't have here.
> Percentage foreign born is more important than all other variables combined (since they would contribute 39% of the total variance)
Hmmm. I think that it is the r-squared that is the proportion of variance in Y that is accounted for by X. Accordingly, the Spearman correlation of 0.61105258893120507 means that 37.3% of the variance in Y is accounted for by X, so really there is 62.7% of the variance still to be accounted for by other variables. There could well be another variable that explains the relationship better. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_rank_correlation_...
[2] I am assuming here that the relationship of correlation to variance for Pearson correlation works the same as for Spearman. I think they should, since Spearman rank correlation is just Pearson correlation applied to pairs of ranks.
Go ahead and visit Salt Lake (I am comparing to Colorado). I think they either don't have the money or out of principle do not maintain their roads. That's the economy. The geography is not favorable either. Salt Lake sits in a bowl surrounded by dark hills with little vegetation. The hills are all dug by mines and open pits. They have the whole range ("on the other side") that is essentially one big mine. The winter…
> The political landscape is very bleak. This is the most conservative state in the nation. Utah hates their environment so much, that they are working on shrinking or destroying several National Monuments (Escalante and Bears Ears). Their congressmen are loathsome Trump toads like Chaffetz (who investigated Park Service for making a folder with maps for a new monument, but refused to investigate anything about Trump…
SLC suffers from inversion, and this article fails to address it... Would never live there. Worst air quality in the nation during the winter.
A religious organization subsumes state roles, providing social services as a way to reinforce social cohesion as well as the power structure in the religious hierarchy. The authorities dictate everything from clothing style to "volunteer" effort. Young men are exploited for their energy and lack of common sense to expand borders. Guys, am I talking about the Latter-Day Saints or ISIS? I'll bet you a beer that Megan…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you can lift up people in situations like that, I'd be much more impressed. > But I think the lack of a real lower and upper class would make mobility look artificially better. I'm a bit confused. Aren't these contradictory? By not having poverty haven't they achieved the raising people out of poverty bit already?
The thing is, Utah has never had a truly poor population. They aren't raising people out of poverty, but it's growing fast and most of the people who move there are relatively rich compared to the general population. But also, Utah has the fifth richest bottom quartile of any state, about 40% higher than North Carolina's. So yes, it's much much easier to move from that to the top quartile than in most states.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/why-low...