People keep moving to Texas. CNBC says they should think twice.
CNBC ranked Texas among the worst states for living in 2026. (Emma Weidmann, San Antonio News)
It occurred to me, but apparently not to the author of the article or the authors of the CNBC ranking it was based on, that the conflict between the CNBC rating of states by quality of life and the movement of workers into the states that CNBC thought they should be moving out of was a puzzle.
There were two explanations. One:
The state scored an F on quality of life due to crime, low access to healthcare and reproductive rights and a lack of inclusiveness and worker protections.
While Texas came in at No. 2, Tennessee took the top spot. CNBC’s ranking says Tennessee has “a rash of state laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community, including a so-called ‘bathroom law’ requiring transgender people to use the facilities designated for their sex at birth.” Texas has a similar bill.
(Oklahoma has) one of America’s strictest bans on abortion. The Sooner State ranked 40th for worker protections last year, according to Oxfam America,1 which said that the state’s $7.25 minimum wage …
(Alabama) also ranks at the bottom for its worker protections, which include only two of the 16 measures that Oxfam America considers critical…
Georgia offers few protections for LGBTQ+ people, making it one of America’s least inclusive states. The Peach State offers minimal worker protections, particularly when it comes to the right to organize.
The ranking on quality of life, part of a measure of attractiveness to business, was based in part on how well the state conformed to progressive policy preferences. It apparently did not occur to the authors that while a law allowing an MTF transsexual to use the women’s room may be a plus for transsexuals it might be a minus to parents with daughters, and a lot more workers are the latter than the former. Laws unfavorable to “the LGBTQ community” are a negative feature of a state to some workers but a positive feature to others, that being the reason such laws get passed. It also may not have occurred to the authors that since a high minimum wage does not guarantee a job at that wage, workers who are not worth that much to anyone would prefer to live in a state with a lower one.
Part of the explanation of the conflict between the CNBC measure of the quality of life and the observed behavior of workers is that the CNBC authors are progressives and most of the workers are not. The authors are either blinded by ideology or engaged in deliberate propaganda; the fact that workers are moving out of blue states and into red states is evidence against their views that needs to be obscured or explained away.
All of the ten states CNBC rated lowest have Republican governors and Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature.
Political bias is one explanation of the conflict between the CNBC ranking and the observed pattern of interstate migration but there is another. Imagine two states, A and B. A has a high level of public services and good public schools funded by high taxes, restrictive zoning designed to favor single family homes, regulations and legal precedents that set a high minimal standard for rental housing. It offers a high quality of life at a high price, making it attractive to high income residents.
B has low levels of services, poor schools, low taxes, housing that is low quality — and inexpensive. Poor people would rather live in A if they could afford it but they can’t. They would prefer to live the life of the rich in other ways, eat better food, work pleasanter jobs, live in bigger homes, if they could afford those too. A is a state for rich people, B for poor. Statistics show that life is better in A. The crime rate is lower; crime is mostly committed by the poor. Health care is better; richer people can afford medical insurance and better doctors.
“The Lone Star State has America’s highest rate of people without health insurance at 16.7%, according to the United Health Foundation, more than twice the national average. More than 17% of Texas adults said they had to forgo a doctor visit that they needed in the past year because of the cost. Even those who do have health insurance can have trouble finding a doctor. The state finishes dead last in primary care physicians per capita.”
(Arkansas) but nearly 19% of its households lack the resources to put adequate food on the table, placing the Natural State dead last for food insecurity, according to the United Health Foundation.
The CNBC authors were confusing characteristics of a state with characteristics of its population, implicitly assuming that the reason A’s residents were rich was that they lived in A instead of that the reason they lived in A was that they were rich, and similarly for the residents of B. Of the ten states that CNBC rated with the lowest quality of life, five were, measured by average income, among the ten poorest states.
It is not exactly political bias — high crime rates and poor medical care are unambiguously bad in a sense in which low minimum wages and trans-friendly bathroom laws are not — but it is an error that fits a pattern.
For an application of economics to a different part of the law, consider the nonwaivable warranty of habitability, a legal doctrine under which some courts hold that apartments must meet court-defined standards with regard to features such as heating, hot water, sometimes even air conditioning, whether or not such terms are provided in the lease —indeed, even if the lease specifically denies that it includes them. The immediate effect is that certain tenants get services that their landlords might not otherwise have provided. Some landlords are worse off as a result; some tenants are better off. It seems as though supporting or opposing the rule should depend mainly on whose side you are on.
In the longer run, the effect is quite different. Every lease now automatically includes a quality guarantee. This makes rentals more attractive to tenants and more costly to landlords. The supply curve, the demand curve, and the price, the rent on an apartment, all shift up. The question, from the standpoint of a tenant, is not whether the features mandated by the court are worth anything but whether they are worth what they will cost.
The answer may well be no. If those features were worth more to the tenants than they cost landlords to provide, landlords should already be including them in their leases — and charging for them. If they cost the landlord more than they are worth to the tenant, then requiring them and letting rents adjust accordingly is likely to make both landlord and tenant worse off. It is particularly likely to make poorer tenants worse off, since they are the ones least likely to value the additional features at more than their cost. A cynical observer might conclude that the real function of the doctrine is to squeeze poor people out of jurisdictions that adopt it by making it illegal, in those jurisdictions, to provide housing of the quality they can afford to rent. (Law’s Order, Chapter 1)
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Whose slogan is “Make a more equal future.”
Where’s the puzzle? I see nothing non-obvious here.
BTW I suspect many people favor or oppose bathroom laws not because they want to use certain bathrooms, or shelter their daughters from having to share bathrooms with certain people, but because the existence or non-existence of a bathroom laws is to them a kind of litmus test for the ideological climate in that jurisdiction more broadly.
Your critique of the implied warranty of habitability assumes low income tenants have market power. Tenants are forced to accept terrible conditions because the only alternative is being homeless. The IWH remedies this imbalance of power. Further, the IWH prevents landlords from extorting tenants due to the extremely high transaction costs of moving (particularly as a percentage of income and the high opportunity cost of not working). Curious your thoughts on these aspects of the IWH