That’s a really interesting question that my cognitive science professor once discussed at great length back in my uni days.
Mississippi should, by all rights, be the richest state in the Union, richer than California. It has some of the world’s most productive farmland. It has easy transportation to the rest of North America and the rest of the world. It would be, at least on paper, a perfect place for tech hubs, communications hubs, logistics hubs, shipping and transport hubs.
Mississippi should be rolling in dosh, spitting out billionaires like a Pez dispenser, richer than most countries.
Yet it’s the second poorest state in the US after New Mexico, with nearly 18% of the population living below the poverty line. In terms of gross income per capita, it’s the poorest.
What gives?
My cognitive science professor had a tripod hypothesis built on three legs: A history of slavery, rabid xenophobia, and contempt for education.
First, the slavery. Slave states are, generally speaking, underperforming states today. The states with the highest per-capita rates of poverty in the US are, from poorest up, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, New Mexico, Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, Oklahoma, New York, and Texas. All of them (yes, even New York, which was a slave state until 34 years prior to the start of the Civil War) were slave states. All of them except New York were strong slave states, with slaves making up significant portions of the population; in Louisiana for most of its history, slaves outnumbered free people!
My high school civics professor had a saying: “Slavery makes you lazy.” A society that embraces slavery produces a culture where slaveowners feel entitled not to have to work. In a society where slavery is overwhelmingly based on race, you end up with cultures where the preferred race embraces the idea that they’re intrinsically superior and shouldn’t have to work.
Slave societies tend not to advance industrially. Rome could’ve been a lot more industrialized than it was; they invented crude steam engines, but never actually developed them into useful tools because when you have slave labor, why do you need them?
And slave societies invest an astonishing amount of their labor and manpower in maintaining slavery and putting down slave revolts. In the Antebellum South, male sons of plantation masters were often required to join anti-rebellion militias. When you’re out on horseback looking for signs of slave rebellion, you aren’t doing something more useful like inventing or creating or developing new business models.
In the US, the fact that slavery was based on race led directly to the second problem: xenophobia. Racism, especially structural, institutional racism, hurts everyone, including the bigot. When you truly believe one race is inferior, and you deny people of that race the opportunity to become doctors or business owners or engineers, you cut yourself off from their contributions.
When this guy:
Firmly believes he is absolutely 100% superior to, and has nothing whatsoever to learn from, this guy:
that hurts both of them, not just the Black guy. Racism is a double-barreled shotgun with one barrel pointing backward.
And speaking of researchers, the slave states tend to have cultures that embrace tradition for its own sake, largely driven by nostalgic longing for a time when the “inferiors” knew their place, and resist change. This resistance to change is almost always accompanied by strong anti-intellectualism and hostility toward, even contempt for, education.
That’s fine in a pre-technological agrarian society, but the fact is, in the world we live in today, anti—intellectualism just plain flat-out doesn’t work.
Nowadays, even farming is a tech job. I mean, Jesus, have you seen the inside of a combine? It’s basically a data center on wheels.
Same for modern heavy construction machinery. Here’s the cockpit of a modern bulldozer:
The residents of slave states feel left behind by modern society. They despise book learning, look down on people of other races, and then can’t figure out why their coal mining jobs are gone and why they can’t find a new job.
Grandpappy used to fix cars but now they’re all computerized this and electric that. The coal mine ain’t hiring because nowadays one guy sitting behind a touch screen can run six machines that do the job of eighty workers. They dropped out of high school, and now those slick MBAs are saying you need a diploma just to work in the warehouse…IT’S THE MEXICANS’ FAULT!!!!1!!11
So here we are.
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