Paul Krugman:Mild Winters and Crank Economics

Neil Irwin writes about migration patterns within the United States, and points out that they overwhelmingly reflect just two factors. Most important, people are moving to places with mild winters:


(snip)
the search for mild winters can lead to a lot of spurious correlations. With the exception of California — which has mild winters but also, now, has very high housing prices — America’s warm states are very conservative. And that’s not an accident: warm states were also slave states and members of the Confederacy, and a glance at any election map will tell you that in US politics the Civil War is far from over.

The point, then, is that these hot red states also tend to be low-minimum-wage, low-taxes-on-the-wealthy jurisdictions. And that opens the door to sloppy and/or mendacious claims that low wages and taxes are driving their growth.

This really shouldn’t even be controversial — I think it’s kind of obvious.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/mild-winters-and-crank-economics/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto&_r=0