> And the state is doing poorly in meeting their needs. Utah ranks 48th in licensed child care centers per capita
I imagine LDS people probably have stay at home mothers at a vastly higher rate than the general population? If so then this stat says nothing about whether the state is meeting their needs.
Something's definitely fishy here. Neither US News nor CNBC have very good methodology, but US News seems to have put a bit more work into finding metrics that directly represent quality of life, instead of just analyzing regulations, and assuming their effects on quality of life.
pfannkuchen · 7h ago
It’s pretty weird that stories with glaring methodological flaws are just discussed by the public as if they are plausibly correct.
I want a news source that I can trust to vet this sort of thing, but the closest I can get is full of crazed ideologues. But I also don’t want them to call out that it’s wrong. I just want them to pass the information on to me assuming I wouldn’t care to even know that this article exists, why would I care to read what the flaws are, etc
thunky · 1h ago
> I want a news source that I can trust to vet this sort of thing
Then stay away from ranked lists like this. They are national enquirer level news.
There's just no way to boil these topics down to a single number that has any value.
jandrewrogers · 8h ago
Any model that places Utah among the worst States for quality of life in the US discredits itself. No serious person could arrive at that conclusion. It boggles my mind that anyone would even try to sell that.
smcin · 7h ago
In particular I'm trying to demystify the supposed Utah childcare shortage:
I suspect Utah has a very high rate of informal or unlicensed childcare, or exchanges between part-time working mothers, of which Utah has a lot [0]. So again there's much more behind the official stats than a mere headcount of licensed childcare providers.
From Gemini + other article: "In Utah, unlicensed child care providers can care for up to eight [previously six, prior to 2024 HB153] children in their home without needing to be licensed. This means they are not required to have mandatory training, background checks, or undergo safety oversight, which raises concerns about the quality and safety of care provided. Voices for Utah Children says it is the second-highest limit in the nation for unregulated childcare."
Since different US states regulate childcare very differently, it seems silly to compare "licensed childcare headcount" across states as if it was some invariant. And "unlicensed childcare" could merely mean "potentially very high quality childcare, just involving <8 children and the person doesn't have a license, or in a part-time/reciprocal arrangement". Whereas in other states it could be much worse.
Maybe it's a less meaningless methodology to try to estimate demand vs availability by looking at childcare prices in a locality normalized by per-capita income?
IAmBroom · 1h ago
> the Sooner State’s violent crime rate is the 14th highest in the country
OK, so that means the 13 higher-crime states are on this list, too, right? If that's literally the only reason TFA lists Oklahoma...
Sloppy ink-stabbing. A more experienced polemicist would have said "among the highest".
travisgriggs · 8h ago
I wondered about the Utah rankings. There are a lot stay at home parents in the population there. And a lot of multi family and generational sharing. I wondered if those affected the low child care center numbers. Otherwise, the rest resonated.
smcin · 8h ago
> 2025′s worst state for quality of life: Tennessee
If you take statewide averages, yes. But Williamson County, TN is the US's 7th richest, according to Forbes magazine's annual rankings, with a median income of $104,367 [0]. [It also has the lowest violent crime rate of TN counties [1]].
> "The fastest growing county in Tennessee, over half of the 489,250 residents are college educated. The biggest employers in the county are Community Health Systems Inc., United Healthcare and Nissan North America. Williamson County attracts new business with low costs— it has the lowest county tax in the Nashville area, no state income tax and the Nashville area has a 4% lower cost of living than the national average," Forbes wrote.
Memphis, TN (Shelby County) has the highest homicide rate in the entire country.
Why is it in any way meaningful to lump that in with unrelated small cities and counties in TN? (any more than including/excluding East Hammond, IN's gun sales in Chicago metro stats?)
To @bigbacalaoa:
The city of Franklin and Williamson County, TN are not Nashville; they're separate things in the Nashville metropolitan area. So your analogy to neighborhoods of Sao Paolo is offbase.
That article is from a conservative organization, and local crime rates have a much larger impact on individuals than state crime rates, so they could make a "we're right and you're wrong" claim by focusing on the more pertinent data, but instead they came to an even better conclusion: The correlation is so weak that it's easy to manipulate into any outcome, so it's not worth considering.
A very small correlation to a specific category may be statistically significant, but it's what doctors call clinically insignificant, which is to say it doesn't make enough of a difference to bother with.
smcin · 7h ago
Really appreciate your link but I can't understand if "that article" and "they" is referring to Manhattan Institute, my citation of Patch, or the ancestor CNBC article. So I can't understand your second paragraph.
aspenmayer · 4h ago
I think that they are saying that you and/or TFA re: Utah may be making something like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, or maybe even the exception that proves the rule of that fallacy?
> The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are overemphasized. From this reasoning, a false conclusion is inferred. This fallacy is the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which is the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist.
> The name comes from a metaphor about a person from Texas who fires a gun at the side of a barn, then paints a shooting target centered on the tightest cluster of shots and claims to be a sharpshooter.
By not being able to account for the commonly held belief that Utah has a high standard of living, and by focusing on factors that may not be relevant to the standard of living in a specific regard due to local conditions, such as the lower incidence of childcare faciilties not coming up as much due to larger (extended) families filling the gap, while not accounting for that either way in their analysis because it was a blind spot to begin with and wasn't properly hypothesized before analysis, etc, this might be a version of an exception to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy that proves the rule, because it seems that there are actual sharpshooters around, and we find ourselves in Texas, hypothetically speaking.
sMarsIntruder · 8h ago
CNBC’s model puts hefty weight on social-policy scores (abortion, LGBTQ protections, worker rules) and only a light touch on nuts-and-bolts stuff like housing costs, taxes, and job growth. If those social factors top your list, the rankings make sense; if you care more about affordability or wages, the picture flips.
dlcarrier · 8h ago
The article has a confusing link to their methodology section.
The article itself is about their "Quality of Life" ranking, which is weighted into (at 10.6%) their "Top States for Business" ranking. The methodology link in the article jumps to the "Quality of Life" section within the "Top States for Business", ranking, but the other "Top States for Business" weights aren't considered in the "Quality of Life" ranking given in the article.
If you only look at just the "Quality of Life" methodology you'll see that it's— much worse than you were thinking. There's no weights given, but of more than ten metrics considered, it looks like eight or nine of them are purely based on policy, with almost no nuts-and-bolts consideration.
ethan_smith · 8h ago
CNBC's methodology assigns 15% weight to "Life, Health and Inclusion" (social policies) versus 5% for "Cost of Living" and 15% for "Economy" - the full breakdown is available in their methodology document.
sMarsIntruder · 8h ago
I read that, but you can see a common factor and probably bias just by reading the descriptions and photos used.
I understand that people have opinions and my comment goes against this community, but this is what people with common sense can notice.
readthenotes1 · 7h ago
I understand people are questioning the methodology used to create the rankings, but what if this is a false flag operation where a subversive conservative tried to put out a piece reaffirming progressive beliefs that these places are too squalid to survive?
nine_zeros · 8h ago
As expected, deep red states. Soon coming to all of America
dlcarrier · 8h ago
Good catch. From the methodology link, this is the only description of how the states in the article are ordered:
We rate the states on livability factors like per capita crime rates, environmental quality, and health care. With studies showing that childcare is one of the main obstacles to employees entering the workforce, we consider the availability and affordability of qualified facilities. We look at worker protections including livable wage policies, paid leave, and rights to organize. We look at inclusiveness in state laws, including protections against discrimination of all kinds, as well as voting rights and secure election systems. And with surveys showing a sizeable percentage of younger workers would not live in a state that bans abortion, we factor reproductive rights in this category as well.
Out of over ten metrics listed, only one or maybe two are quantitative analysis of what a resident might be exposed to. The rest are an analysis of the states' policies. From that methodology, the expected result would be a direct correlation to which political party dominates, regardless of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the parties' policies.
The article is ranking which states employers should not consider moving to, and matching the political preferences of employees is well worth considering, but this is a very roundabout way of presenting it, and calling it a quality of life ranking is inaccurate.
Also, the variation within a state can be significant, so any business looking to relocate would get much more useful information by comparing between cities or counties, regardless of the state.
PeterStuer · 8h ago
Did you expect CNBC to use a ranking model that was anything but deep anti-red?
refurb · 8h ago
Pretty sure the author of this study made sure of it based on the methodology used.
charcircuit · 8h ago
Because the grading rubric is designed against the values of the people there.
smcin · 8h ago
Jumbling social, economic and environmental considerations [0] into one overall score seems like a terrible methodology, and politicized. Why not just rate them on three (or more) separate scores? If we did this on a country level, we'd similarly get inaccurate overall scores for UAE, Qatar and Singapore (or HK SAR or Macau).
Also this methodology is very much for employers not people in general, since it weights infrastructure/power generation (16.2%), way more than cost-of-living/ affordability of housing (2.4%).
At some point if your values don’t align with healthcare, worker protections and childcare (which all of these states seem to be graded negatively on), it’s not the rubric.
selectodude · 8h ago
Values such as access to food and being able to go to a doctor.
hobs · 8h ago
Economy
Infrastructure
Workforce
Cost of Doing Business
Business Friendliness
Quality of Life - specifically
With workers in short supply, companies are seeking to locate in states that can attract a broad array of talent. That makes quality of life an economic imperative. We rate the states on livability factors like per capita crime rates, environmental quality, and health care.
The list goes on, but almost none of these are "against the values of the people there" unless their values are making less money and getting screwed over.
brazzy · 8h ago
They value violent crime?
defrost · 8h ago
You're saying we shouldn't judge those who enjoy higher levels of domestic violence?
Just like in the rest of the country, violent crime in Oklahoma has been trending gradually lower in recent years.
But at roughly 418 offenses per 100,000 people in 2023, the Sooner State’s violent crime rate is the 14th highest in the country, according to FBI statistics.
Of particular concern is a sharp rise in domestic violence homicides, which State Attorney General Gentner Drummond recently called an “epidemic.”
I imagine LDS people probably have stay at home mothers at a vastly higher rate than the general population? If so then this stat says nothing about whether the state is meeting their needs.
Something's definitely fishy here. Neither US News nor CNBC have very good methodology, but US News seems to have put a bit more work into finding metrics that directly represent quality of life, instead of just analyzing regulations, and assuming their effects on quality of life.
I want a news source that I can trust to vet this sort of thing, but the closest I can get is full of crazed ideologues. But I also don’t want them to call out that it’s wrong. I just want them to pass the information on to me assuming I wouldn’t care to even know that this article exists, why would I care to read what the flaws are, etc
Then stay away from ranked lists like this. They are national enquirer level news.
There's just no way to boil these topics down to a single number that has any value.
I suspect Utah has a very high rate of informal or unlicensed childcare, or exchanges between part-time working mothers, of which Utah has a lot [0]. So again there's much more behind the official stats than a mere headcount of licensed childcare providers.
From Gemini + other article: "In Utah, unlicensed child care providers can care for up to eight [previously six, prior to 2024 HB153] children in their home without needing to be licensed. This means they are not required to have mandatory training, background checks, or undergo safety oversight, which raises concerns about the quality and safety of care provided. Voices for Utah Children says it is the second-highest limit in the nation for unregulated childcare."
[0]: https://universe.byu.edu/2019/01/14/how-utahs-child-care-cha...
Maybe it's a less meaningless methodology to try to estimate demand vs availability by looking at childcare prices in a locality normalized by per-capita income?
OK, so that means the 13 higher-crime states are on this list, too, right? If that's literally the only reason TFA lists Oklahoma...
Sloppy ink-stabbing. A more experienced polemicist would have said "among the highest".
If you take statewide averages, yes. But Williamson County, TN is the US's 7th richest, according to Forbes magazine's annual rankings, with a median income of $104,367 [0]. [It also has the lowest violent crime rate of TN counties [1]].
> "The fastest growing county in Tennessee, over half of the 489,250 residents are college educated. The biggest employers in the county are Community Health Systems Inc., United Healthcare and Nissan North America. Williamson County attracts new business with low costs— it has the lowest county tax in the Nashville area, no state income tax and the Nashville area has a 4% lower cost of living than the national average," Forbes wrote.
[0]: https://patch.com/tennessee/franklin/williamson-county-natio...
[1]: https://mtsusidelines.com/2024/04/11/crime-rates-in-tennesse...
Why is it in any way meaningful to lump that in with unrelated small cities and counties in TN? (any more than including/excluding East Hammond, IN's gun sales in Chicago metro stats?)
To @bigbacalaoa:
The city of Franklin and Williamson County, TN are not Nashville; they're separate things in the Nashville metropolitan area. So your analogy to neighborhoods of Sao Paolo is offbase.
That article is from a conservative organization, and local crime rates have a much larger impact on individuals than state crime rates, so they could make a "we're right and you're wrong" claim by focusing on the more pertinent data, but instead they came to an even better conclusion: The correlation is so weak that it's easy to manipulate into any outcome, so it's not worth considering.
A very small correlation to a specific category may be statistically significant, but it's what doctors call clinically insignificant, which is to say it doesn't make enough of a difference to bother with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
> The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are overemphasized. From this reasoning, a false conclusion is inferred. This fallacy is the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which is the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist.
> The name comes from a metaphor about a person from Texas who fires a gun at the side of a barn, then paints a shooting target centered on the tightest cluster of shots and claims to be a sharpshooter.
By not being able to account for the commonly held belief that Utah has a high standard of living, and by focusing on factors that may not be relevant to the standard of living in a specific regard due to local conditions, such as the lower incidence of childcare faciilties not coming up as much due to larger (extended) families filling the gap, while not accounting for that either way in their analysis because it was a blind spot to begin with and wasn't properly hypothesized before analysis, etc, this might be a version of an exception to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy that proves the rule, because it seems that there are actual sharpshooters around, and we find ourselves in Texas, hypothetically speaking.
The article itself is about their "Quality of Life" ranking, which is weighted into (at 10.6%) their "Top States for Business" ranking. The methodology link in the article jumps to the "Quality of Life" section within the "Top States for Business", ranking, but the other "Top States for Business" weights aren't considered in the "Quality of Life" ranking given in the article.
If you only look at just the "Quality of Life" methodology you'll see that it's— much worse than you were thinking. There's no weights given, but of more than ten metrics considered, it looks like eight or nine of them are purely based on policy, with almost no nuts-and-bolts consideration.
The article is ranking which states employers should not consider moving to, and matching the political preferences of employees is well worth considering, but this is a very roundabout way of presenting it, and calling it a quality of life ranking is inaccurate.
Also, the variation within a state can be significant, so any business looking to relocate would get much more useful information by comparing between cities or counties, regardless of the state.
Also this methodology is very much for employers not people in general, since it weights infrastructure/power generation (16.2%), way more than cost-of-living/ affordability of housing (2.4%).
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/11/how-we-are-choosing-americas...
The list goes on, but almost none of these are "against the values of the people there" unless their values are making less money and getting screwed over.
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