I don't get Connecticut

I thought Connecticut was all liberal and educated and stuff but I heard Hartford and New Haven and Bridgeport were kind of like…dumps or something. Yet the state seems to be full of rich people but where are those rich people exactly? Certainly not in the cities that matter.

But if it’s so liberal why is the income inequality so bad? Cause I thought them Democrats liked social programs that were supposed to end these kinds of things.

I’m confused. This state is weird yo.

With respect to where the wealth is:

Interesting. Well, what’s up with Yale and New Haven being so poor? I thought maybe the smartest people in the world would have been able to do something about that.

doesn’t this apply to all cities? Cities are liberal, and the richest people live there, as well as the poorest.

Yale is about the only thing in New Haven worth visiting and the area around the campus is quite nice. Universities like churches are exempt from property taxes. Students don’t pay anything to the city and professors are not required to live in the city (although I would guess a fair number do). Yale ma kes voluntary payments to the city, the amount of which is a contentious issue…

Seems like Yale has come to the realization that promoting the city will benefit the university.

That describes NYC. There are no really rich people that live in Hartford, New Haven or Bridgeport, although in the 1800’s when these where manufacturing centers there were. This sale illustrates how few really rich people want to live in the Hartford area.

Not really in the sense that when you contrast it with something like Manhattan, people actually want to live there.

Because liberals want income equality when it’s other peoples’ money that’s getting “equalized”.

Because liberal politics doesn’t actually meaningfully address inequality. Like lots of things in politics, there’s a lot of talk about it, but little action. Conservatives barely seem to care in a direct way at all, although they’ll whine about knock-on effects like crime rates.

In any case, while cities are generally liberal, the degree to which they are varies and there doesn’t seem to be a strong correlation with objective stats like gini coefficients. Places like Atlanta and Houston are right on par with San Francisco or NYC.

A couple of additional thoughts to put apparent Connecticut weirdness in context:

First, Connecticut cities and towns are geographically small. There are 169 of them crammed into a pretty small state. Hartford proper, which at times can seem like a hellscape, is only about 4 square miles, for example.

When comparing CT cities to those in other parts of the US, it may be useful to overlay the CT city on a map of the city you’re comparing it to. More than a few cities in the US have 4-square-mile cores comprised of downtown plus a hellacape.

As to the political makeup of the state, while CT seems pretty blue from the outside, in reality it’s only blue in a fairly small, but densely populated, corridor along I-95 southwest of New Haven and I-91 between New Haven and Hartford. Once you move away from that corridor, things start turning pretty red. Not quite to the extent of redness that you find in the heart of Ameristan, but pro-Tr*mp paraphernalia is not unknown in the state.

As to the income inequality…it’s aggravated somewhat because of the number of bankers and hesge-fund folks who come to Fairfield County for marginally lower taxes while still having easy access to Manhattan. But even with that in mind, the tendency for some wealthy blue folks to not always practice what they preach is not unique to CT.

You live in Chicago. Come on. You understand this just fine.

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Because liberal politics doesn’t actually meaningfully address inequality. Like lots of things in politics, there’s a lot of talk about it, but little action.eral politics doesn’t actually meaningfully address inequality. Like lots of things in politics, there’s a lot of talk about it, but little action.

Almost a sweep for red states.

Several of the states with low levels of poverty are in the Northeast or are near a major East Coast city. Here is a list of the 10 states with the lowest poverty rates in 2019 and 2020.

  • New Hampshire: 4.9%
  • Minnesota: 7.0%
  • New Jersey: 7.2%
  • Utah: 7.4%
  • Washington: 7.6%
  • Massachusetts: 8.0%
  • Idaho: 8.1%
  • Maryland: 8.1%
  • Wisconsin: 8.2%
  • Virginia: 8.3

It would be interesting to do a simple statistical difference in means test between red states and blue states.

Now you could make an argument that there is a confounding variable (education levels) that leads to the effect. Non college educated whites are now the base of the Republican party…

I dunno if I’d point to Hartford and New Haven as the CT cities that “matter”. Sure they’re old and were wealthy a couple hundred years ago. Maybe try Greenwich and Westport?

But Westport and Greenwich are Fairfield County, which isn’t really Connecticut. :sunglasses: