An overview of Wikipedia citation statistics

Although I have known of Wikipedia’s citation templates for some time — it is true that when I first made edits there I either did not use them or they had not been created — it is only recently that I have studied them in detail.

What one might call the “big four” — {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite news}}, {{cite web}} — have been familiar to me for some years now, because they can be used directly when adding a citation without copying the blank template from the appropriate linked site below. It is only recently though that I have attempted to look at all the templates in “Citation style 1”, and to see if and where I can use them.

A few days ago, I edited an article on the geography of Antarctica and did not know what to do with publications of the Geological Society of London, and of “Scientific Reports”. Presuming by the title that they must be reports of some sort, and seeing they did not fit the criteria to use {{cite report}} (a template I had used before discussing civil rights politics),  I put them under {{cite tech report}} — a rarely-used template found in only a little over two thousand Wikipedia articles (vis-à-vis over a million for the “big four”).

However, re-reading the template for {{cite tech report}}, it was clear to me that the articles I had cited therewith on Geography of Antarctica did not fit the criteria for {{cite tech report}}. They seemed to be closer to {{cite conference}} or {{cite journal}}, although I know nothing about what conference proceedings are.

The problems I had with this made me both message my brother for some discussion and to actually tabulate the frequencies of the various {{cite...}} templates, which I have done below, alongside percentages of Wikipedia pages used and how the template appears in links (if it does do so).

Frequencies and Appearance in Reference Texts of All Style 1 Wikipedia Templates:

Template	# of Wikipedia pages	% of Wikipedia pages	Template in reference text
{{cite arXiv}}	5,865	0.0099%	in link
{{cite AV media}}	61,062	0.10%	as |type=
{{cite AV media notes}}	29,630	0.050%	as |type=
{{cite bioRxiv}}	415	0.00070%	in link
{{cite book}}	1,763,420	3.0%
{{cite CiteSeerX}}	427	0.00072%	in link
{{cite conference}}	19,030	0.032%
{{cite document}}	1,653	0.0028%	as |type=
{{cite encyclopedia}}	219,847	0.37%
{{cite episode}}	18,233	0.031%	as |number=
{{cite interview}}	9,492	0.016%	(Interview)
{{cite journal}}	1,094,239	1.9%
{{cite magazine}}	338,377	0.57%
{{cite mailing list}}	811	0.0014%	(Mailing list)
{{cite map}}	46,609	0.079%	(Map)
{{cite medRxiv}}	159	0.00027%	in link
{{cite news}}	1,734,008	2.9%
{{cite newsgroup}}	653	0.0011%
{{cite podcast}}	5,158	0.0087%	(Podcast)
{{cite press release}}	76,594	0.13%	(Press release)
{{cite report}}	61,348	0.10%	(Report)
{{cite serial}}	279	0.00047%
{{cite sign}}	833	0.0014%	as |medium=
{{cite speech}}	1,426	0.0024%	(Speech)
{{cite SSRN}}	557	0.00094%	in link
{{cite tech report}}	2,351	0.0040%	(Technical report)
{{cite thesis}}	41,638	0.071%	(Thesis)
{{cite web}}	5,013,194	8.5%

The problem of “don’t ask” just from fearing no

This evening I went into a terrible temper tantrum when my mother complained that I left cooking rissoles for tonight’s dinner until they were seriously overcooked and smelling.

The tantrum, with familiar phrases (mantras) like:

“get the word “can” out of your head”

“there’s no such word as “can””

and less familiar mantras like

“I used to be able to [remember to come down] but I can’t now”

and gestures like trying to place the word “can” in the rubbish bin in the kitchen [by pointing to the rubbish bin in a terribly agitated manner], became so bad that I even walked out of the house without my mobile phone! Outside I was just as angry and agitated — trying basically to make my mother recognise that I was totally incapable of reminding myself that I had cooking to remember when I was sitting at the very computer where I am writing this post.

My mother was just as upset as I was — and I might note that she has not been well in recent weeks, having mucus-y coughs for the past week or more. It has been difficult for me to appreciate her troubles, but I hope I becoming less bad at it.

After I came back — deliberately knocking softly in order to, as it were, persuade my mother that I had calmed down — I did speak much more calmly about the issue. I enjoy cooking, but my mother had said that I might have to give it up if I forget it time and time again as I have been doing for the past few weeks.

When I look at it logically, I recognise how I was obsessed with watching football and possessed zero desire to do the cooking. I simply wished to watch the football and listen to music as I had been doing for many hours before I went out to walk the dog, but feared my mother’s opinion too much to say “no”. So, I did the cooking as quickly as possible and was quite lucky in fact not to burn the spring onion, celery and mushroom mix that was to be mixed with the mince to make the rissoles. Although I said to Mummy that I would come back when I put the rissoles in the oven, I immediately and totally forgot as soon as I was back settled at the computer watching football. There was not the slightest thought about what was happening inside the oven until the DVD was finished. So unconcerned was I that I was actually surprised that the rissoles had nearly burned over!

Once I came back, realising that I could not keep screaming and screaming outside, and even feeling my vocal cords somewhat weakened, I tried to talk to my mother about what needs to be done to give some hope this will not happen as consistently as it has been of late. I am probably reasonably convinced that there is no hope I can be instructed to remember to come down when I am totally focused on listening to music or on watching football (of course, anything I am watching on the computer would have the same effect as football!). Both of us were extremely upset at the way I expected my mother to be a “lackey” upon whom we can fall back whenever I forget cooking jobs that I do just to please her when my actual desire is to listen to music or watch something on the computer. I actually say I want to cook to appease my mother when I actually want to spend all day doing exactly what I want — which, today, was to watch football.

However, the most notable lesson from tonight’s tempera tantrum was that my consistent refusal to ask my mother whether she would either:

1. remind me by coming up to the study or
2. look after my cooking

out of fear of being told “no” is really, really bad. It might be wise because I know all too well that if my mother said “no” I would most likely go straight into a meltdown as bad as today’s. However, my deliberate silence has meant that my mother and I are both left ignoring the cooking with risks of burning. When I look at it, I thought of the many old English cricketers — for example Walter Brearley or George Louden — who would likely have greatly improved England’s prospects in Australia but were never questioned about touring because MCC was sufficiently aware they had zero possibility of being away from business for so long. My case is different because I have never tried — out of partially justifiable fear of being told “no” — to ask my mother to watch over my cooking. Instead, I assume she will do so as my slave. When in a tantrum, of course, I justify it as a “one-way street” where I can do and get exactly what I want one hundred percent of the time, although logically this “one-way street” is totally selfish and makes everybody else totally immaterial. It is clear to me — whether I cam capable of change or not (and I have zero belief I am) — that I must do something to prevent me forgetting my cooking, or develop some sort of compromise where I do the preparation and my mother agrees to watch over the cooking. In a logical mood these compromises are terribly unfair to my mother, but given my lack of genuine interest in cooking it is unclear what else we can do??

A look at my garden

Although I seldom do this, my mother has long been noticing her orchid in flower in this mild and dry weather, and this morning she decided to photo it and I – affected by shoddy iron-on patches and the prospect of ruining a pair of jeans that actually fits my fatter-than-ever body – accepted the photo although my heart was in nothing but getting a properly sticking pair of iron-on patches or sending the jeans to a tailor. I have a glimmer of hope about this issue but fear ruining a good pair of clothes!

The orchid is striking when looked at – and the beauty of the flowers actually matches some of the textbooks on the topic I recall reading years ago. The picture still reveals the problems the house has had with its back and side walls – it is not something with a rustic appeal like so many older goods handmade from quality materials.

A strange sight!

Today, as I removed my scarred but still good metal drink bottle (I prefer metal to plastic as it wears better even without the paint and at university always chose to use a metal ruler even for paper) to try to find a drink in the heated room, I observed a rude shock.

The bottle did not open when I twisted it! I was initially worried that something was really awry and that I would have to replace the bottle, but past experience quickly dawned upon me that the lower part of the fridge was a frost hollow where dense, cold air generated by the fridge sank and chilled the bottle to the point that it froze. In the past I have seen frozen milk in the fridge in the event of spills – although I hope that at thirty-eight I am better than I was about allowing bottles of milk to spill when there’s not the space to store them upright.

This is my largely frozen drink bottle from when I finally managed to unscrew the (faintly visible) cap

A few hours later, despite my mother using a heater – I feel that even in winter Melbourne is too warm for heating and that three layers will be plenty on a typical 6˚C morning – the bottle is still only partially thawed and I could not drink from it as I wished:

This is my partly thawed drink bottle a few hours later

The shock of an unexpected freeze was as bad to me as much more costly freezes to farmers around the world! It left me a little thirsty too!

Proof of how insular our suburbs really are

Over the past decade and a half, just how insular and unaffected by prevailing trends in music and culture the suburbs in which I and most children in Australia were raised actually are has dawned upon me.

Even when I still lived at Keilor Downs, I was well aware that many different stations existed in suburban Australia. The vast majority of small stations, however, played extremely conservative and often very old pop music, and only Triple J and Triple R played anything different from what Joe S. Harrington and David Keenan demonstrated to me during the 2000s as extremely derivative commercial music whose originators were never heard on Australian radio.

What Triple J at all events played was generally even worse – tuneless, noisy grunge bands like Silverchair, the Offspring and Nirvana which I had so little patience with that it drove me off commercial radio when hearing the tuneless “New Mexico, New Mexico”. The music of community stations I already thought very uninteresting, but it was not as bad as those bands or the Presidents of the United States of America – and experience was making it tough for me to try “alternative” music as I thought “alternative” was all really violent and inspired people to say things like “I’ll (expletive) kill you” or “I’m gonna shoot you, (expletive)”, which had me worrying about my life.

However, reading about music on a broader scale showed that – whilst I was only able to listen to a very restrictive range of pop music – a musical and cultural revolution was happening in the Enriched World, whereby gangsta rap and thrash metal were becoming mainstays of most of the population, especially the working masses. “Generation X”, as it was called, took up radical individualism and radical egalitarianism as its basic ideals, ones that were heard on the mainstream of Australian radio very little and only for a few years in the middle 1990s before teen pop took hold of airplay.

As a young man, I assumed these ideals would be stronger in Australia because of its “car culture”, but now I recognise that the insular character of the family car is actually entirely opposite to the extreme masculinity (much more absolute hatred of traditional femininity) found in the Enriched World’s modern culture.

In recent times, election results and opinion polls show that we are witnessing a repeat of this divergence (in other words, a further divergence of suburban Australia from Enriched World political standards). Whereas Enriched and Tropical World cities are so densely crowded any child is enfolded in noise, as I can testify from being in Berlin and Singapore, most Australian cities are extremely quiet and there is ample space for families to play and enjoy themselves as well as study.

Under such conditions, it is clear that parents would prefer to avoid something at all angry, let alone the anti-religion anthem of the Enriched World’s Generation X – ‘(expletive) Hostile’

or what may become its equivalent for the Enriched World’s “Generation Y” and “Generation Z” – the overtly controversial ‘Pearl of a Girl’

because these would be disturbing to the establishment of family relationships. Indeed, it is very likely that hearing such songs would have an effect on community relationships in general, because their message is clearly one of complete individualism with laws to eliminate restraint thereon, as opposed to merely an absence of laws to limit individualism. At the same time, songs like ‘(expletive) Hostile’ are what can teach children about industrial-age Enriched World culture – the music taught in schools does nothing theretoward.

In 2003, Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling in ‘The Do Re Mi’s of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences’ showed that there exists an “upbeat and conventional” category characterised by

“genres that emphasize positive emotions and are structurally simple”

which clearly corresponds to the type of emotions mothers would wish to convey to their children, rather than the “structurally complex” character of classical and jazz or the “full of energy and emphasise themes of rebellion” character of alternative and metal. It is thus not surprising that pop, soundtrack and religious music dominate in quiet and isolated residential enclaves distant from commercial or academic hotbeds. This is indeed the tendency I saw at every record store in the outer suburbs of Melbourne during my regrettable “galloping round the countryside” on buses a decade ago: the shelves, much more than in city stores, were filled with “easy listening” and country artists who would be considered dated by most in the Enriched World or inner suburbs.

Major and most minor radio stations are all present or past “pop and Top 40” in format – completely lacking are the college stations or non-classical public stations of the Enriched World – so that there is little incentive to play much variety of songs. Neither have genuinely cutting-edge bands toured Australia whilst in what critics regard as their “prime” – for instance Metallica were all but unknown down under until they released their self-titled album, whose change of style caused many old fans and later converts to their 1980s albums to rename the band ‘Selloutica’ or ‘Metallicash’. Young mothers and fathers would certainly turn off the radio if they played a song like ‘Pearl of a Girl’ whether they heard the blasphemous lyrics or not, whereas the students and lower-class workers of Enriched World cities, feeling unjustly treated by the market or politicians, take perfectly to them and their messages that people have every right to do whatever they want no matter how it affects others (emotionally as well as physically).

The recent findings of Jason Millward in the 18 August Advertiser should thus not be considered remotely surprising, although major radio stations used to have lists of the top 500 songs or albums of all time and still do “no repeat” days during the week, whose veracity I have always believed without ever bothering to check. Millward’s study, like last year’s election, should be as instructive to foreigners wanting to learn about Australia as to Australians themselves, and my hope is that it will begin a long-needed correction of misconceptions about Australia and its culture.

How materialism hinders fertility in the Enriched World

It has long been known by commentators like Oskari Juurikkala that large welfare states – brought about by the demands of the working classes of the Enriched World to equalise their share of wealth and that of women who labour in order to nurture children – inherently produce very low fertility because children become no asset to support the elderly once payment of the wealthy are appropriated for this purpose. Many Austrian-school economists have shown data that – with considerable accuracy but no consideration of the politics involved – demonstrate how Enriched World fertility declines as soon as welfare states grew.

The popular opinion of Austrian economists is that if the Enriched World’s ruling classes could cut back their welfare states, then lowest-low fertility in the Enriched World would be reversed because children would become the asset they were before welfare states were introduced.

Austrian economists spend little time discussing the political pressure that has prevented any Enriched World ruling class from completely dismantling the welfare state as they would recommend. Austrians do admit that the welfare recipients themselves are a major obstacle to this being done, but understate the point because – as Arthur Brooks has shown and my family’s experience with groups like Socialist Alternative and the Democratic Socialist Party confirms – welfare recipients tend to be far to the left politically and extremely militant. With hindsight this is obvious since if they lost any of their welfare payments recipients would not longer be able to afford what they can, and as it stands they cannot afford all they want. Welfare classes of today will likely remove any Enriched World government that passed bills to dismantle the welfare state by violent force, irrespective of whether or not they could vote it out. Even the poorer classes of the Enriched World who do work do not have the distance from the wealthy to avoid persistent envy and consequently belief in radical equalisation has been a constant among Enriched World working classes since their formation.

However, with ‘Roadblocks on the Road to Grandma’s House: Fertility Consequences of Delayed Retirement’, Erich Battistin, Michele de Nadai and Mario Padula have seemingly put an end to the argument that immediate reduction in welfare by the Enriched World will improve its fertility situation. They show, using the example of Italy, that welfare reform has served to extend the working life of old women and reduced the level of care provided to young children. They article shows how the requirement of labour among grandparents means that children receive less care than they would if grandparents did not have to work.

The most telling means by which this is shown is demonstrating that the most “conservative” parts of Italy actually have the worst problems, although the extent of class struggle in the south means that there is the possibility Italy does not constitute anything like the range of political views in the so-called “developed” world (the north of Italy has had perhaps the most intense class war anywhere in the world). Battistin, de Nadai and Padula show that fertility in southern Italy was much higher than in the socialist North for cohorts born before 1970, but is now even lower.

It is however certain that even in Southern Italy – quite unlike Australia – the working masses are extremely resistant to ending the welfare state. No reflection exists on how the welfare state will prove economically and socially costly: envy undoubtedly maintains desire for wealth accumulation amongst both the poor and rich of the Enriched World, as Battistin, de Nadai and Padula show no differences between poor and rich families regarding grandparental requirements.

The radical individualism of the Enriched World certainly disrupts family ties as workers fail to accept mundane low-paying jobs even if it might mean lower prices and greater purchasing power in the long term. As this tendency grows, doing something to halt the decline of the Enriched World’s importance may become impossible before it is noticed.

A rare meal together with my brother

Although my mother has been in Xī‘ān over the past week, there has been the surprise of seeing my brother for the first time in a long while as a result of him working in Oklahoma and wishing to gain a prestigious job in Oslo. It has been wonderful to see my brother, though he still is extremely busy and the familiar tendency to sleep all morning is still apparent, although he says it is jet lag and that he has to get up every day to do much more serious work than I have ever had to.

As a result, though to my benefit after having to spend a whopping $165 to get back into the house after locking myself out through wrongly taking Mummy’s car keys without realising that she had taken away her own house key! it was terribly tiring for someone who was getting back into a better rhythm before this event, and it still effects me today even as I plan for a lot of Wikipedia work with very limited funds.

However, this Saturday, with the weather in Melbourne becoming much worse than its been (read “hotter” for “worse” if you do not believe me), I decided I should cook dinner for Jonathan for once and I was surprised at how much of a success I made of cooking some terribly old vegetables into a chicken stew. Jonathan really liked it - and in fact he helped whist I bought some new chicken stock so the stew could actually be made. I have a rare picture of it which I will show to see what you think:

A new house?

Although she has been concerned about the possibility that our back wall would for over a decade - at one point we worked intensely to remove a Chilean willow and ivy vine to stabilise it - it is only very recently that my mother has acted decisively about the crumbling structures of our home of fifteen years. The recent order of the Melbourne City council that all potentially unstable walls within the local government area be demolished has caused her limited finances great difficulties because the combined cost of demolishing and rebuilding the back and side walls could be a large fraction of my mother’s yearly salary - at a time where I am doing as little as ever to find some work that could ease the home’s dependence on her salary at Penleigh.

A week and a bit ago, my mother thought that the wall would be demolished and rebuilt by Tuesday 16 April, but the dangers of a standard demolition delayed the job of the demolition of the back wall until the last minute. I watched the demolition and - without showing it to the builders or even to my mother when I spoke to her that night - did feel concerned about the western wall between our courtyard and the living room next door.

Still, it is a shock to see that the western wall may need demolishing, and that we may have to move into a new house. With my brother working overseas, Mummy even thought of moving to the gorgeous climate of Tasmania with its 21˚C summers because of the lower cost of housing (and energy with less need for air conditioning) compared to suburban Melbourne! I have often thought that even if we did have to move to have the western wall demolished we could save money by moving into a relative’s home, but Mummy dismissed the possibility and said that there would be enough housing to rent.

Having not moved for a long time and acquired so much material - though I do try to be discriminating nowadays and do have a feeling I am more efficient with money than for a long time - it would not be easy to move. Yet, the side wall and even the front glass-brick wall may soon need replacement as the cement in it is just as loose, and especially in the summer it would be too uncomfortable to stay.

Thoughts on a day’s bus trip: with planning one can be sustainable even here

For a long time, I was obsessed with buses and alarmed at the appalling services. Most buses in Melbourne went every half hour on weekdays, every hour on Saturdays and not at all on Sundays or public holidays - even when they went past Waverley Park on match days! I often imagined most bus drivers went to church on Sundays and that the people who ran bus companies were very religious and conservative - though my brother denied this consistently and now I laugh at it.

Recently, bus services have improved very marginally, though the way to make them profitable via cutting road capacity is never taken seriously. However, I have become less interested and no longer inclined to joke about drivers spending their time praying and reading the Bible on Sundays since I know bus drivers actually work on Sundays more often than many other people.

Still, when I bought a copy of the latter-day Doug Wilhelm Choose Your Own Adventure The Underground Railroad and was offered the option of travelling to pick it up, I did not hesitate to do so even though I knew the bus services where pathetic compared to those in Enriched and Tropical World cities.

However, what is notable compared with previous trips as recently as to Mooroolbark to pick up a few old Fitzroy games, is how well I planned my trip. I actually planned the trip outwardly to Vermont South exactly at midday - as exactly as planning which 742 bus from Oakleigh Station I would travel to Vermont South. All along I read a huge selection of poems from Thomas Merton which I had bought several years ago but never put away. I was quite interesting in places, actually.

Even with only one bus every forty minutes, it was very easy for me to reach Vermont South, and with direction from kind locals I found the house easily. Better than that, I did not ask obsessive questions about where the best weather in Australia is (and I know most do not agree with me that outside of the winter the answer has to be Tasmania) and did not waste time getting back to the 742 bus.

When I got back to the 742 bus, I went to Oakleigh station and did a bit of my old “galloping” on buses: riding for the first time ever the 701 from Oakleigh to Bentleigh and the the 703 from Blackburn to North Brighton after missing a train looking around the run-down shops of Bentleigh. I will admit there is, as with my half-sister’s sunshine home, a lot of charm to run-down places when they are a bit functional. At Brighton I considered my original aim of going into the city by bus before I found it would take forty minutes and went on the train home, in the process having read much of my new book.

All in all, it was a surprisingly easy bus journey, and offers lessons for visitors to Australia. Because Australia is so fragile, it is ecologically unacceptable to ever use cars or planes unless there is no remote alternative, yet the public transport is appalling without really good planning With such planning, however, it would be possible to travel more quickly than even I did - a satisfactory result one would guess for a tourist in the city.

Living costs and real poverty and wealth

In his book The Nine Nations of North America, Joel Garreau thirty-two years ago said that the poorest state in the United States, if one adjusts for cost of living, was Maine and not Mississippi (though he said that the poorest places in all of North America were Canada’s Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island).

My mother and brother tend to deny that in fact the New England states are poorer than the South, arguing that their large welfare states mean poverty is not nearly so bad for those who lack money.

Below is a table from a 2008 survey of all states and the District of Columbia compared in terms of wealth adjusted for cost of living, along with the percentage of residents receiving welfare payments.

	Median Household Income	ACCRA Cost of Living Index	Adjusted Median Household Income	Percentage of residents on welfare
Hawaii	$67,214	163	$41,236	3.1%
District of Columbia	$57,936	137.9	$42,013	4.3%
Alaska	$68,460	133.93	$51,116	6.1%
California	$61,021	131.46	$46,418	3.2%
Connecticut	$68,595	128.8	$53,257	2.8%
New York	$56,033	128.02	$43,769	3.0%
New Jersey	$70,378	127.23	$55,316	2.1%
Maryland	$70,545	125.4	$56,256	1.6%
Rhode Island	$55,701	121.7	$45,769	2.8%
Vermont	$52,104	119.9	$43,456	2.9%
Maine	$46,581	119.2	$39,078	4.8%
New Hampshire	$63,731	117.1	$54,424	2.4%
Massachusetts	$65,401	117.1	$55,851	2.7%
Oregon	$50,169	105.03	$47,766	2.4%
Arizona	$50,958	104.27	$48,871	2.1%
Washington	$58,078	103.59	$56,065	3.4%
Nevada	$56,361	102.5	$54,986	2.2%
Minnesota	$57,288	101.58	$56,397	3.1%
Montana	$43,654	101.3	$43,094	2.2%
Pennsylvania	$50,713	100.87	$50,276	3.2%
Colorado	$56,993	100.83	$56,524	1.8%
Delaware	$57,989	100.45	$57,729	2.1%
New Mexico	$43,508	99.9	$43,552	2.4%
South Carolina	$44,625	98.62	$45,249	1.7%
Wyoming	$53,207	98.3	$54,127	1.3%
Virginia	$61,233	98	$62,483	1.6%
Florida	$47,778	97.99	$48,758	1.4%
Michigan	$48,591	97.6	$49,786	3.4%
Illinois	$56,235	97.5	$57,677	1.8%
Louisiana	$43,733	96.91	$45,127	1.4%
Wisconsin	$52,094	96.81	$53,811	1.7%
North Carolina	$46,549	96.43	$48,272	1.5%
Utah	$56,633	95.25	$59,457	1.5%
Indiana	$47,966	95.02	$50,480	2.6%
Iowa	$48,980	94.77	$51,683	2.2%
North Dakota	$45,685	94.7	$48,242	1.9%
West Virginia	$37,989	94.68	$40,124	2.3%
Ohio	$47,988	93.64	$51,247	2.6%
South Dakota	$46,032	92.8	$49,603	2.1%
Missouri	$46,867	92.7	$50,558	2.3%
Georgia	$50,861	92.41	$55,038	1.3%
Idaho	$47,576	92.07	$51,674	2.5%
Alabama	$42,666	91.86	$46,447	1.3%
Nebraska	$49,693	91.67	$54,209	2.3%
Kansas	$50,177	91.48	$54,850	2.3%
Mississippi	$37,790	91.43	$41,332	1.8%
Texas	$50,043	91.26	$54,836	1.6%
Arkansas	$38,815	90.18	$43,042	2.0%
Oklahoma	$42,822	89.48	$47,857	3.3%
Kentucky	$41,53	89.18	$46,578	2.4%
Tennessee	$43,614	89.05	$48,977	2.4%

A more recent look has suggest that Hawaii, though still the fifth richest state by raw income, is in fact the outright poorest when adjusted for its exceedingly high living costs, deposing Maine from that status for the first time in forty years if what data I have are accurate.

One telling result from these tables is that the Pearson correlation coefficient between cost of living index (by which this table is sorted) and percentage of population on welfare is +0.26, whereas that between income and percentage of population on welfare is near zero. This really does completely contradict the claims of my mother and brother that the large welfare states of the Northeast ease poverty, and may show that in fact their high tax rates (“Taxachusetts”) actually mean that they are even poorer than the figures suggest. Efforts to correct for tax burdens have never been made; although when calculating Gini coefficients of income inequality this correction is routine.

A telling feature of the list is how, with the conspicuous exception of Alaska, every state with ACCRA index above 106 is solidly Democrat and mostly atheist, whilst the thirteen states with lowest ACCRA indices are all Republican. This really suggests that living costs are, as I have argued for the past seven years or so, the primary determinant of a region’s politics. It also suggests that:

1. there is a strong relationship between poverty and politics
2. that this is driven by the difference is the wants of various populations rather than nominal wealth
3. that conservatives are conservative because of their limited wants
4. conservatives’ willingness to tolerate lower quality of life as are found in the Republican states or in Australia means they gravitate to areas with poor services but more space
5. the greater purchasing power of conservatives may increase their happiness
6. over the long term, the effect of a decline in the purchasing power of money since the 1970s may be much greater than actual real incomes suggest
• an idea put forward by Austrian economists who argue that counting the public sector exaggerates wealth and prefer “Private Product Remaining” to measure wealth.
• Austrians even believe that workers in the public sector should not be counted in wages and that this may further lower today’s real wages

Young, glaciated regions with no endemic species because their flora and fauna are a mere 10,000 years old have the dilemma of lowering their living costs and size of government to a competitive level. In ecological terms, regions like New England and Scandinavia should have the lowest living costs in the world rather than the highest, and it is an interesting question whether a gold standard or even an international silver standard would be capable of doing this in the absence of farm subsidies and other controls.

Indeed, proving that an international commodity money could do this is a big task for free market economists because it is only by reversing the present gradient in living costs that an international commodity money could encourage conservation in the regions - Australia and subequatorial Africa - that need the highest standard of conservation for their unique low-productivity ecosystems. If and only if their abundant mineral resources could price other “replaceable” exports from Australia and subequatorial Africa out of the world market under an international commodity money, there would be hope for two pressing problems under our present fiat money system.