January 18, 2009

Average Credit Ratings by State

According to CreditReport.com website, the top ten states with the highest average consumer credit ratings are found among the people of:

South Dakota 710
Minnesota 707
North Dakota 706
Vermont 706
Massachusetts 703
New Hampshire 703
Montana 701
Iowa 700
Wisconsin 699
Maine 699

In contrast, the ten populations with the worst average consumer credit scores are:

Texas 651
Nevada 655
Arizona 659
New Mexico 663
Louisiana 663
South Carolina 665
Oklahoma 666
North Carolina 667
Arkansas 668
Mississippi 668

California (672) and Florida (673) are closer to the bottom than than the top.

Texas largely escaped the mortgage meltdown due to low land prices and high oil prices, but this suggests there might be trouble in Texas ahead if oil stays around $40 per barrel.

What does it all mean? As George Will coyly hinted in his obituary for Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
"The Senate's Sisyphus, Moynihan was forever pushing uphill a boulder of inconvenient data. A social scientist trained to distinguish correlation from causation , and a wit, Moynihan puckishly said that a crucial determinant of the quality of American schools is proximity to the Canadian border. ... [S]tates trying to improve their students' test scores should move closer to Canada."
Indeed.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

43 comments:

  1. oh, things are going to be a lot worse than that. the main oil field in mexico, the cantarell, is in permanent decline. when output hits a low enough level, mexico will cease to be an oil exporting nation, and will become an oil importer.

    all the oil money going to the mexican government will dry up. something like 50% of their budget comes from oil and PEMEX. PEMEX refuses to de-nationalize and allow smart white guys from the US and europe to show them how to recover oil that's a little harder to access than light sweet crude just bubbling to the surface like a scene straight out of "there will be blood." so they're stuck with whatever they can figure out on their own. which isn't much, as i've elaborated on before. not much brainpower in mexico, a nation of 100 million with, i think, 0, or nearly 0, nobel science prizes.

    when will this all happen? the cantarell peaked in 2003 at 2.1 million barrels per day. now it's down to 800,000 barrels per day. mexico will cease to export oil once it gets to 400,000. that should be happening in the next 2 to 3 years.

    this will send lots of unemployed short brown guys...well, you know where they'll be heading.

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  2. "Moynihan puckishly said that a crucial determinant of the quality of American schools is proximity to the Canadian border. ..."

    So Cleveland and Detroit and Chicago are hugh glaring black swans.

    -Frank

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  3. You can't blame OK on minorities.

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  4. Oil won't stay at $40 a barrel for long.

    Leases in the Barnett Shale field of North Texas had been going for almost $25,000 upfront, plus royalties. Now landowners are lucky to get $5,000 an acre.

    Exploration budgets for drilling and exploration are being slashed. The excess supply will be worked off at some point. Always has been.

    The floor for oil is probably $35 to $40 a barrel.

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  5. "Moynihan puckishly said that a crucial determinant of the quality of American schools is proximity to the Canadian border. ..."

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    George Will missed it. What Moynihan puckishly
    meant was the importance of hockey. When you get hit by the puck it smarts!

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  6. jody:

    I find your comment about Cantarell to be dead-on with the exception of the part regarding "smart white guys." At best they could bolster the production for a year or three, which would be followed by an even steeper decline when it reached a local maximum (think of it as a mini-peak).

    Humans, even white humans, even Asian and Ashkenazi humans, cannot infinitely mine a finite source.

    Back to the topic at hand, I graduated from a public Houston high school that is consistently ranked in the top 100 in the nation, the kind that feeds a couple dozen to Rice alone, and another few dozen to other top 25 universities. All of which to say it was pretty decent by today's standards. Would someone like to guess how diverse it was?

    We had a graduating class of just under 500, and fewer than a dozen black students, and scarcely more Latinos. Plenty of Vietnamese and Chinese people. And lots and lots of shining white faces.

    But all that is surely a coincidence.

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  7. You can't blame OK on minorities.

    No choice but blaming it on the devil then (look at its score).

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  8. I vividly remember Moynihan perpetually bitching about those “racists white regimes” in southern Africa. But I never heard him say a word about the ethnic cleansing and butchering under Mugabe (whom I recall he was instrumental in installing), nor the endless farm murders and ethnic cleansing in South Africa. Him and his ilk stand out in their selective interpretation of "racism".

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  9. Roger Chaillet said...
    " The floor for oil is probably $35 to $40 a barrel."

    I hope you're right. Lower oil prices will take the air out of a few of the nasty agenda's being foisted on Europeans and NAmericans. I can think of environmentalists, ME-strategists and Arabian expansionists all losing a little steam along the way. Oh, I forgot those nasty Russians and old Hugo.

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  10. I suspect that the real problem is understood by Moynihan and Dr. Spiesel, mentioned in the Venereal Disease post. However, they have noticed that when you say "The Emperor has no clothes," the Emperor's vast army of supporters will tear you limb from limb. So instead of pointing out the obvious, they hint around it, making observations like, "Does anyone else think the Emperor's clothes are unique in a way that's hard to pin down? Where would one get the type of cloth needed to make such an outfit? Can someone please do the research on that? I'm just asking; I personally don't have a clue."

    They seem to hope that eventually the conventional wisdom will be that the Emperor, indeed, is starkers, at which point they can tell everyone that they knew that all long. Until then they'd rather avoid being tarred and feathered.

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  11. This sort of pattern is also seen internationally. The Scandinavian countries are notoriously honest. Finland (sort of Scandinavian) is the perenial winner of the Transparency International Coruption Perceptions Index.

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  12. Perhaps it's the temperature! The colder it is, the better the credit and scholastic test scores. So, we should be thankful that we are perhaps entering a new Ice Age as it will make us smarter!

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  13. I think the saying in the South is, "Cash, trash, and flash".

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  14. The credit worthiness of the USA itself is going to reflect the racial transformation of the country. United States Treasury bonds will lose AAA rating during this crisis and probably never regain a legit AAA rating.

    The State of California never regained a AAA rating after 1986 (year of Reagan's amnesty).

    The only way to head off the oncoming second rate status of America is for national financial ratings themselves to be made worthless: global socialism.

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  15. From what I understand, the credit scale goes from 350-800 I believe. For a scale with this width, I don't think a gap of 42 points from the blackest to the whitest is unbelievable, given other factors (geography, history, placement, migration patterns, resources, etc.) between Mississippi and North Dakota. An interesting place to start would be the different rates in credit between North Dakota whites and Mississippi whites.

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  16. This diagram shows low ratings of a State's long-term (general obligation) bonds* is largely explained by the presence of foreign-born population in that State -- particularly after present for more than a decade.

    For more see Immigration Degrades Long-Term State Bonds.

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  17. "An interesting place to start would be the different rates in credit between North Dakota whites and Mississippi whites."

    North Dakota whites will be higher than Mississippi whites, but the gap would be even narrower than the general gap; read Steve's article comparing the working classes of England and America. I believe it had "ruin in a nation" in its title. Louisiana, West Virginia, and Mississippi have the dullest whites. Even so, West Virginia is not even amongst the worst ten.

    This meltdown is horrible when your state is worse than Louisiana with its combination of a large black population and extremely dull whites.

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  18. dhuklq

    Was that high school Bellaire?

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  19. According to the Laboratory of the states, the 3 states with the lowest female fertility rates are VT, NH and Maine.

    The 3 heighest are UT AZ and NM.

    Obviously the effect of having children is negative for your credit score, but having virtually no children won't work either.

    BTW The Barnett Shale area is a natural gas play.

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  20. "Why men are more intelligent than women

    Taller people on average are more intelligent than shorter people. And men in every human population are taller than women."

    You know I was just thinking about that the other day. I work at a senior level in a large corporation with lots of women executives, and there is no doubt in my mind that men are smarter than women. So many times the women just aren't able to grasp things intellectually in the same way that many men can.

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  21. Southern whites have always been less creditworthy than Northern whites. Georgia was founded as a debtors prison by the English. Texas was founded by whites from Tennessee and Arkansas who were fleeing their creditors and left for (then) Mexican Texas.

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  22. Truth:
    The average man in Holland is 6'1, the average woman is 5'9, why aren't they smarter than the Jews, Japanese or Brahmins?

    IMO, the height-IQ connection is very limited, and goes only one way. The "golden zone" of IQ 105-120, notable for producing socio-political elites such as Presidents and Ivy League alumni, is also notable for its height and muscularity. But beyond 120, there is no longer any connection. Most of my super-smart friends are average height, some short, some tall, some very short, some very tall. Most are skinny, though.

    While high IQ, can, within a certain range, translate to height, the reverse is not true. Look at the NBA and NFL - hardly the national brain trust!

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  23. "Ask any one who has been in a language class with a Dutchman, or who has been exposed to their English-speaking proficiency can attest to this."

    The Dutch are no fools, and they've undoubtedly made a disproportionate contribution to modern civilization relative to their small population. But their high-level of English proficiency is probably more the product of the affinity it shares with their native language, rather than any unusual aptitude for second-language acquisition.

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  24. Actually, although it may not be reflected in Dutch IQ scores, the Dutch are extremely good language learners. Ask any one who has been in a language class with a Dutchman, or who has been exposed to their English-speaking proficiency can attest to this.

    No, the Dutch learn other languages in order not to have to speak their own ugly-sounding language.

    Ok that was a cheap shot. All of the Dutch English-speakers I've met are difficult to distinguish from American English-speakers except that their vocabulary is larger.

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  25. And that Moynihan quote was the first thing that came to mind before I scrolled down and saw you quote it.

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  26. the mean IQ in the netherlands is around 102 or 103. for practical purposes they're about as smart as any other high IQ group. they're easily as smart as brahmin indians if not smarter, and about equal to the japanese.

    there's about 13 million ethnic dutch people in the netherlands and they've won 16 nobel science prizes in the last 100 years. not a bad account for themselves.

    the netherlands has a higher GDP per capita than japan by about $4000 US.

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  27. the mean IQ in the netherlands is around 102 or 103. for practical purposes they're about as smart as any other high IQ group. they're easily as smart as brahmin indians if not smarter, and about equal to the japanese.

    Good lord I'm tired of being told how much smarter Asians are than Europeans. There are 1.2 billion people in India alone, which is almost certainly more than all the white people on the planet (and that's if you're generous by including partial whites like Hispanics). And while there are certainly lots of smart, rich Indians, do they even come close to outnumbering the smart, rich Europeans?

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  28. Antoine Zhang said...
    "But their high-level of English proficiency is probably more the product of the affinity it shares with their native language, rather than any unusual aptitude for second-language acquisition."

    Its easier than that. Their close proximity to England and their dependence on commerce.

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  29. Please no more Japanese cheerleading. They are not the big geniuses of the world. Yes they are intelligent people. But the smartest thing they've ever done was to adopt a million western ideas.

    When your society is constructed around nearly all foreign ideas ... from your political system to your lightbulbs to your internet to your clothing ... that means you're not the big geniuses of the world.

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  30. Somehow this thread got hijacked into a male-female height IQ discussion. I don't approve of hijacking but I'll go along just this once.

    When I got my undergraduate degree in psychology the revealed wisdom was that men and women had identical mean IQs. This seemed odd at the time since men were known to have larger brains and a different neural anatomy from that of women. For example women have a much bigger corpus callosum which appears to account for the substantially less lateralization in the female brain. We also knew way back then that women did better on the verbal IQ battery subtests and less well on the quantitative subtests.

    We even knew that the IQs of men and women had been set equal to each other by fiat. The historical accomplishment evidence clearly favored men as being smarter but we accepted the notion that men and women were exactly equally smart.

    Then about a half dozen years ago the attitude of researchers shifted. Suddenly the evidence all around us was no longer explained away. Men were credited with being about 3 to 5 points smarter.

    OK. The new interpretation of sex IQ differences seems to make sense. It seems to conform with common sense.

    But this Japanese writer in Psychology Today still wants to preserve the dignity of women, so he suggests that women are plenty smart. They are just short.

    As it happens we also knew forty years ago when I was a psychology undergraduate that there is a correlation of about .10 between height and IQ. We were taught that population IQ scores were taken on the whole population including the institutionalized. This meant that the man on the street was a little smarter than the full average because the really stupid people were not allowed on the street. They were in hospital beds.

    There are a lot of genetic defects that lower IQ. They also tend to make you short. Trisomy 21 (Down's Syndrome) patients for example are short. It was well known that the IQ distribution is not completely Gaussian. There is a small peak at the far left tail that represents those who are genetically or environmentally disadvantaged.

    These used to be a lot of people who had been starved in childhood. Such people are rare today in advanced countries. Where they still exist they are not very smart and not very tall. They are like midieval peasants.

    It was clear even in the sixties that the correlation that arises between height and IQ was not because tall people were smarter but because certain short people are dumber. In the normal or Gaussian distribution of IQ there is no correlation between height and IQ. That's what we were taught then. That's what I believe now. The two normal distributions are orthogonal.

    For much human history there were two classes of people. The well fed and educated aristocracy versus the semi-starved and uneducated peasantry. The nobles were tall and smart. The peasants were short and stupid. No genetic explanation is required. Today when comparative nutrition is no longer much of a factor between the classes we still associate height with IQ.

    Height almost certainly has nothing to do with the slightly lower IQ of women. I don't trust this guy's new research findings. Nor should you.

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  31. You can't blame OK on minorities.

    Why not? It's full of Indians.

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  32. Oh sure, mental retardation and physical stuntedness are usually linked. But how then do you explain Palowakski Syndrome - gigantism plus mental retardation plus moral retardation (i.e. vicious cruelty?)

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  33. >>>>>Why not? It's full of Indians.<<<<

    Who happen to the be the second richest ethnic group in America. Somehow I doubt they're causing the problem. Unless you mean Native Americans. Maybe you Americans should stop confusing your terms. You'd think you'd be smart enough to decide once and for all what an Indian is.

    @Anonymous

    You keep convincing yourself how the Japanese/Asians aren't the geniuses, while we keep beating you for all the scholarships, international academic competitions, technological advances in society, low crime.......but hey at least you guys have blue eyes right! And you can brag about all the technology and science and music you invented (which we have taken and now perform better).

    If you want to talk about race realism, then you accept all the facts. If you're just interested in feeling good about the noble Aryan race, then look elsewhere. That's the problem with most of these sites, they're ready to get on and start insulting blacks and Hispanics but never want to face up to their own deficiencies.

    By the way I'm not so sure that "Brahmin" Indians are the smart ones. How come all the software companies are disproportionally in the South of India where there are less Brahmins? There's something more complicated there.

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  34. "we keep beating you for all the scholarships, international academic competitions, technological advances in society, low crime.......but hey at least you guys have blue eyes right!"

    Hey, that's pretty good comic satire!

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  35. @Truth

    Don't take this too seriously. In reality I'm a nice guy, not the yellow-supremacy jerk that I appear to be here.

    But on a forum like this, you have to fight fire with fire. If these people are going to come and and start insulting non-whites then I have to give them a good dose of reality before they imagine that their Aryan supremacy delusions are correct.

    If you're going to call yourselves race realists then you're going to have to shatter your notion of white supremacy. It just isn't true.

    But, like that guy in the other thread here (who I was referring to), you can stroke your egos over "physical beauty", right?

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  36. Truth said...
    Hey, that's pretty good comic satire!

    u were talking bout an african country, right?

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  37. Takahata Yuichi said

    all the technology and science and music you invented (which we have taken

    Freudian slip.

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  38. Takahata,you don't have to apologize. I LOVE a good literary brawl.

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  39. >>>>>all the technology and science and music you invented (which we have taken

    @David

    You don't seem to understand what a Freudian slip is.

    I'll give you a hint, it isn't a sentence that means exactly what the author intended it to mean.

    Whites invented a lot of stuff.

    The Japanese took it.

    We're better at it now.

    The end.

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  40. Takahata, somehow I don't believe you came here to promote equality, but rather to spout facts of Japanese superiority.

    Anywho, just to see how it feels, here is a group of people that are far more productive than the Japanese, (both in IQ and creativity), the Ashkenazi Jews.

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  41. Rather cool site you've got here. Thank you for it. I like such topics and anything connected to this matter. BTW, try to add some images :).

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  42. Takahata wrote - By the way I'm not so sure that "Brahmin" Indians are the smart ones. How come all the software companies are disproportionally in the South of India where there are less Brahmins? There's something more complicated there.

    --

    The IT Industry in India was almost entirely a south Indian brahmin controlled field for many years

    All the founders of Infosys, Cognizant, most of the high level staff in Tata consultancy were south Indian brahmins

    Narayanamurthy, Nilekani, of Infosys are South Indian brahmins

    later as the demand for H1B grew out of control, they had to go lower in quality and hired non-brahmins, mostly of mediocre quality

    Sathyam was a non-brahmin controlled firm and they used to compete only on price and hired cheap peasant caste affirmative action candidates, and Sathyam went under for embezzlement

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