A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked states by 10 criteria in order to discover which are the best places to live in America. Places like New Hampshire and Minnesota finished at the top, but the headline turned out to be at the other end of the scale.You can find a brief recap of the study at “Why the South is the Worst Place to Live in the U.S. — in 10 Charts” in the Oct. 7, Washington Post.

The bottom five were Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, West Virginia and Tennessee followed by South Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New Mexico, Kentucky and Georgia. The list is striking for containing most of the states of the Old Confederacy. And those missing didn’t do much better, Texas at 37th and North Carolina 29th. Only Virginia inched into the top 25, barely, at 22, and there is an obvious reason for Virginia’s exceptionalism — the prosperous, well-educated, diverse Washington suburbs that have turned Virginia purple in the last few elections.

We used to hear about the New South, but this report makes it look a lot like the old version is alive and unwell. The Southern states — and a few fellow travelers like West Virginia and Arkansas — do badly on virtually every measure — health, safety (that is, crime), housing, education, jobs, environment and income. The Post précis claims to explain why the South is the worst place to live, but it merely demonstrates statistically how it is a bad place to live. So what is the reason why?

Several spring immediately to mind. First, the legacy of slavery and the subsequent segregation continues. Many states in the Midwest and Plains are as much as 80 percent white. By contrast, the Carolinas are 65 percent white, Louisiana 60 percent, Mississippi 58%, Georgia 55 % and Texas, because of its ever growing Hispanic population, is just 45% white. These population numbers keep Republican strategists awake at night since many Southern states, if customary voting patterns persist, could begin turning blue.

But that’s the political byproduct of the socio-economic reality, that these minorities are still more poorly educated than their white peers, a higher proportion suffer all the attendant ills — poorly paid jobs, poor health, poorer housing. It may be argued that the poor performance of minorities is not a result of discrimination, but it take a real effort of will to believe it isn’t a factor. Especially since it is so blatantly on display in all but separate and clearly unequal schools, harsher punishment for minorities in the courts and substandard health care.

Behind all these effects — detrimental to Southerners, black, white and Hispanic — is a familiar cause: the political and economic philosophy it has embraced for centuries. Before the Civil War, the South was the richest region in America, though the wealth was not exactly evenly distributed. Cotton was king in large part due to low cost slave labor. Even before the Civil War put an end to that advantage, foreign competition spelled trouble in an early instance of globalization.

But the South largely failed to adapt. Rather, since the Civil War it has stuck to a similar policies — small government, few public services, poor schools for poor people and an economy reliant on low cost, poorly educated workers to undercut those elsewhere. By this means, the South lured the textile industry that had made the Northeast prosperous and also competed in the furniture business, but he who lives by cheap labor dies by it. Both those industries have gone to low cost producers overseas as has tobacco. The region is left with a tradition of a few oligarchs and a poorly educated, poorly paid but still uncompetitive workforce.

Attempts to steal auto assembly plants and similar businesses from the North and Midwest or to lure foreign manufactures has had some success, based again on lower wages in rabidly anti-Union states. But few well-paying jobs result and thus there’s little money for workers to spend. This same flaw in depending on poorly paid workers was obvious to Henry Ford 100 years ago. If the workers can’t afford to buy the products they make, who will? The Third World strategy only works if employees are willing to live like Third World workers.

There are ways to break out of the box, but they are philosophically unthinkable in the South. It remains violently opposed to government action and taxation. And in its conservative antagonism to government it has been abetted by an evangelical strain that has demanded history taught on the basis of American myths rather than reality and science scrubbed of any conflicts with Biblical teachings.

So schools remain poor and uncompetitive, the environment is unprotected, investment in infrastructure is slighted and healthcare is substandard. Skimping on healthcare, as in the refusal to set up state exchanges under the Affordable Care Act or to expand Medicaid, has scary economic and public health implications. In the South,
AIDS is now at levels seen only in sub saharan Africa.

And in an economy that now requires a more educated workforce, the South lags.The job recovery since the recession has been worse than the U.S. average in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, West Virginia. Texas has dodged the bullet because of oil and Virginia because of government jobs. In the United States as a whole 39% of whites and 25% of blacks have two years or more of post-high school education. In Kentucky it’s 28% and 22%, in Arkansas 27% and 18%, Louisiana 30% and 17%.

It is believed that between 50% and 60% of jobs from now on will require more than a high school education, but currently the percentage of ninth graders in many Southern states who go on to complete college is abysmally low — 19% in North Carolina, 16% in Georgia and South Carolina, 14% in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. In some Southern states there are little oases of educated prosperity — North Carolina’s Research Park Triangle, Austin’s Silicon Valley in Texas, but one watering hole does not make the desert bloom.

Can anything be done to change this entrenched refusal to alter course? Not as long as the gospel of low taxes, less government, less spending on education, health and public services is viewed as just as inerrant as scripture. If enough of the less prosperous, less educated people who suffer the most could choose a more progressive direction, they might. But the status quo antebellum retains power and uses it to draw gerrymandered districts and restrict access to the ballot box by minorities, students and other enemies of stagnation. Thus, the region continues to win The Worst Place to Live laurels, except for the happy few who write the rules.