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by alephnerd 1 day ago
> Is it possible that maybe Mississippi.... isn't terrible

Pretty much. Mississippi does have significant issues (it's HDI [0] is significantly lower than anywhere else in the UK or US), but is comparable to peers in Metropolitan France [1] such as Normandy, Lorraine, and Picardy, as well as several regions of Italy [2]. Basically, not great but also not some third world despair of darkness.

Most likely, if a deeper subnational analysis was done of Mississippi, there would be a stark difference in HDIs between the unindustrialized Delta and industrialized North and Gulf Coast.

That said, at least it's been decades since Mississippi has seen a race riot where rioters were purposely burning black people's houses like what we saw in Belfast last night [3].

Plenty of Brits need to do some soul searching. There's a reason why even despite Trump, everyone who is eligible for an O1 tries to come to the US over London. Comparing the UK with Mississippi based on GDP per Capita is facetious, but the UK is similar to Mississippi in many other ways.

[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA+GBR/?levels=1+...

[1] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/FRA/?levels=1+4&ye...

[2] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/ITA/?levels=1+4&ye...

[3] - https://time.com/article/2026/06/10/belfast-protests-erupt-k...

1 comments

I was curious about comparisons like the ones you're making between US states and EU countries and made this little app, maybe you'll find it useful!

https://evmar.github.io/states/

It's a good tool! That said, I also recommend looking at European (and other) nations from a subnational lens as well.

The North-South divide in Italy, the FRG/GDR divide in Germany, Northeast and Southern versus Central France, and various other representations of spatial inequality exist within Europe as well.

The reality is a Parisian, Londonian, and New Yorker have much more overlap with each other than they do with their own compatriots, yet it is this class that is overrepresented in any discourse on social and traditional media.

Thanks, I'd love to add them! Do you have a good source for this data? I did a quick look at the site you linked above and I'm not sure whether it has numbers for GDP or landmass for these regions.
This group at IMR Radboud [0] has been working on subnational inequality for over a decade

The reality is landmass and stuff doesn't matter as much as HDI which acts as a lossy indicator of development.

[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/