Arkansas climbed to the top of CNBC's Most Improved State for Business rankings because workers discovered they can rent an apartment and eat food in the same month. Revolutionary stuff.
The state's pitch is low costs and high quality of life. Low costs means your landlord only takes 40% of your paycheck instead of 60%. High quality of life means Walmart exists.
Working-age adults are flooding into Arkansas. They're leaving places where they had to choose between groceries and rent. Now they can have both. They're calling it the American Dream. It's actually just arithmetic with smaller numbers.
CNBC measured business climate, workforce, infrastructure, economy, life and health, technology, education, and cost of doing business. Arkansas won by being cheaper than everywhere else. Congrats to the state that figured out people like having money left over.
Walmart's headquarters sits in Bentonville. The company employs 1.6 million Americans. Some of them now live within commuting distance of the office. Progress looks like being able to afford to work at the place that taught America how to pay people less.
Retail traders are already searching for Arkansas-based penny stocks. They're convinced this ranking means something about future returns. They think CNBC's methodology translates to alpha. They're about to learn that state business rankings and portfolio performance have the same correlation as shoe size and IQ.
The most improved state award goes to the place that was so bad before that getting slightly less bad counts as an achievement. It's like giving someone a trophy for showing up sober. Technically true, but it tells you more about the baseline than the accomplishment.
Workers moved to Arkansas because they did the math and realized they could survive there. That's the bar now. Survival as a selling point. The state that makes you least poor wins the ranking, and we're all supposed to pretend that's not f*cking depressing.
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