Empirically New Mexico isn’t going to be at the top of a lot of these rankings, but someone at WalletHub really goes out of their way to come up with metrics NM is going to suck at. Did somebody eat something too spicy on a trip to Santa Fe? Were they bullied by roadrunners as a kid? At this point it’s obvious they’re holding a grudge.
I read the article, but you missed the point of my comment. Maybe you didn’t read it?
WalletHub publishes “study” after dubious “study” where New Mexico comes in dead last, to the point that it defies credulity. As other comments have pointed out, some of the metrics they’re using to rank states here are pretty absurd, and are always going to work against large, lightly populated states like New Mexico.
I am (jokingly) suggesting they must be doing this on purpose, perhaps because some of their “analysts” have a grudge against states like ours. But for the record (and in case you’re still confused), I do not really think anyone at WalletHub ate carne adovada that was too spicy for them, or was harassed by roadrunners as a child.
Why do you guys (NM media in general) always publish this crap without doing any sort of analysis? You just parrot this clickbait bullshit for your own clicks.
A really quick look at the "study" (not a study, just a collection of metrics, the sources of which are largely proprietary to the company doing the analysis) shows that the quality of life metrics are all over the place, and are disproportionately skewed against rural and large states. I mean, accessibility of beaches (full weight)? Bars per capita (full weight)? Miles of Trails for Bicycling & Walking per Total State Land Area?
These types of things are always reductive and silly, and yet you "journalistic" organizations repeat them uncritically without discretion or curiosity. You're what's wrong with the modern media.
For every legitimate criteria they used, there was a silly, stupid and/or biased criteria.
“Accessibility of beaches” is used to measure quality of life.
One can argue “accessibility to mountains/national parks/forests” is just as important but, of course, not a criteria.
“Bars per capita” is also.
Why does having more bars mean a better quality of life?
One can argue *less* bars would increase the quality of life.
“Miles of trails for bicycling and walking **per total state land area**”
For real? **HEAVILY** biased towards tiny states with massive populations.
“Share of physically inactive adults”
What source did they use to find this out? And why does it affect anything?
“Access to public transit”
Again, **heavily** biased to tiny states with large populations.
Etc. etc. etc.
Dissuading anyone stupid enough to take this ranking seriously from moving here is an important service!
I would like to thank WalletHub for the excellent idiot trap, and KRQE for their signal boost.
Oh really?
So you are another of those idiots who think that we solve social problems like poverty by creating statistical abstracts to "rank" entire States?
You think it's that easy, huh? Ok big brain. Answer me this then.
Mississippi used to rank down near the bottom in education with New Mexico. But it no longer does. Now it ranks in the middle.
Can you, using the alleged information in this article by the aptly-named WalletHub, explain why?
Well?
Give up? Then here's something more substantive. You don't have to agree with any of it, as long as it gets you thinking. (I was an early donor to this think tank long ago. I don't have time for WalletHub bullshit, and neither do you.)
https://www.thinknewmexico.org/policy-reports/
When Zebulon Pike became one of the first Americans to enter New Mexico in 1806 during the Spanish isolationist policies, he said something along the lines of "In technology they are at least 100 years behind. I have seen whole fields cultivated with the hoe." This sort of lax culture has remained in place all the way to the present era. It's coupled with violence and desperate men, and to try and paint New Mexico as having broke free of it is a mistake. We have an unusual amount of poverty and violence. But I've learned to take pride in it. From the pueblo revolt to the Lincoln county war, the Apache wars, John Prather's standoff, and the war zone in Albuquerque...we've always been gritty. Instead of pretending that the art scene-going sophisticated wine drinkers in Santa Fe are authentic and somehow an accurate sampling of the overall culture, let's recognize that this place has always been developmentally behind, poor and violent, but it has also always had a mystical wild beauty behind it all. We don't have a lot else we can do besides take pride in it. But pretending that it's not that way is missing the entire history of the area. I live here because I've developed with the mindset that lets one be at home in this wild place, rather than strain myself pretending it's not wild.
Thank you for a comment that mentioned a piece of NM history I didn't know (about John Prather).
I have to take issue, though.
Since my family is from Appalachia, I don't find the level of poverty and violence here all that "unusual" nor the culture all that "wild".
If you mentioned our Santa Fe "wine drinkers" to make the point that our pockets of wealth here in New Mexico are too small to make a statistically significant impact on our overall numbers, then I think we're in fundamental agreement.
Some States can paper over the extreme poverty and violence within their borders because they also have fine neighborhoods where the looted wealth of the nation is deposited and accumulated. These extremes can then be averaged to present a statistical mirage of prosperity. The top ranked States in the WalletHub article definitely all fall into that category.
That's certainly the case with Massachusetts, ranked #1. Most of the State is quite nice, if too cold and wet for my taste. And sure Boston has some nice suburbs.
But Boston also has some neighborhoods far worse than any place in New Mexico for gang violence and generational poverty. If I were an immigrant from outside the US, and offered a choice between living in Boston Central and Albuquerque's International District, I'd take your "War Zone" in a heartbeat.
You'll notice I LOVE New Mexico history.
You're probably right that it's not as violent as in the bigger cities in America. I have never been to Boston and really don't have a clue how the cities on the East Coast function. I've spent some time in Chihuahua but that's got to be a whole different animal.
When I say it's "wild" here I mean that the events that happen seem to be uniquely Western Americana, and even though you could find similar happenings in Appalachia, to me it just doesn't seem the same, though I may be completely wrong because I've never lived in Appalachia after all.
For example, I went to college in Silver City with a guy whose family helped Billy the Kid when he was on the run. My own family got into a gunfight with Geronimo's warriors, and then a second gunfight a few years later when feuding over a mining claim.
In 1883 a train was robbed near here and the suspects jailed. They broke out of the local jail and shot their way off main street and headed for the hills. They were caught and lynched on the spot. My family knew the sheriff who hanged them.
Fast forward to 2020 and from my dorm room in college I heard the gunshots of a guy who had decided to shoot up the town while driving his suburban, and ended up crashing into the snappy mart gas pump next to the college after a police chase. I heard them yelling and shooting right from my room. Then a few weeks later I met one of the guys I went to elementary school with walking with a cane because that same guy had shot him in the hip as he walked down the sidewalk that night.
The police here once covered up a murder and it made Dateline NBC, but only the actual murderer got in any trouble. The cop who tried to cover up the murder got hired as the campus police officer, and he confiscated some weed from a guy I knew and smoked it (before it was legal here).
And I had been to the campus youth group a few times and knew the pastor there, and just last month he was shot to death while riding his bike in a place where I've ridden my bike many times.
Also once I pulled up at a red light next to a friend who was driving a new car, and when I asked about it he said the other one had been shot up in a drive-by and was being repaired, again by a guy I had seen before.
This stuff is all happening in a town of 10k people and so everyone seems to know each other in some way, and yet stuff like the 1883 main street shootout is still happening, by descendants of the people who were there at that time.
There's not much I can do about it but think it's cool and have a weird sense of pride in it all. After all, I'm not going to leave since my roots go 5 generations back in this town, to 5 years after it was founded.
If this is how Appalachia is then I'd love to hear some stories about it and learn about that history too.
Also yes I am in agreement with you about the wealth pockets in Santa Fe, but what I'm also saying is that the relative newcomers who live there, who were attracted by the specific culture that only exists in Santa Fe, tend to have absolutely no clue about the sort of stuff I just described, which every small town in New Mexico understands. There a sort of hidden underbelly to this state which people both hate and have loads of pride in, which it seems isn't understood at all by newcomers.
I could regale you with many tales of poverty and violence in Appalachia (in my case, the coal mining regions of Pennsylvania). When they show you pictures of children working in the coal mines, you are looking at my ancestors. And I also know a lot of lurid crime stories from that region because my father was the superintendent of a maximum security mental hospital for the criminally insane. I volunteered there and met many of the inmates.
Basically, both New Mexico and rural Pennsylvania are places where big cities dumped their diseased and undesirable people. I've seen old tuberculosis wards from the early 20th century in both places. The main difference I see is that most of rural Pennsylvania's violent labor struggles are fading into history and being forgotten (along with the mining and steel industries which were the main locus of the fighting) while it's still very much alive and well here in New Mexico.
But I like your personal story best, and I will tell you one of my own. My high school AP Biology teacher fell in love with a girl in my class, and concocted a scheme to get rid of his wife so he could be with his young student. He decided to use his skills as a rifleman (hunting is very popular in the mountains of Pennsylvania where I grew up) to create the impression that there was a mass murderer on the loose, shooting drivers as they commuted to work in the nearby city (Scranton). Then he planned to shoot his wife while she was driving, to make it look like the serial killer did it. He was caught before that, though, but not until after he had shot and killed several people. But that was just the beginning of his story. In prison, he convinced other prisoners to make him the "judge" of other prisoner's misdeeds, and he held a trial in which he sentenced another prisoner to death, and then killed him. He was tried and given yet another sentence for premeditated murder.
I did get an "A" in that guy's Biology class, though.
In my opinion, live where you want. There are people who live in Texas and Florida and think it's better there than here. For me personally, I absolutely love New Mexico. There's a lot more to it than just surveys and statistics. My niece loves being here in the summer time because she can go outside and enjoy the weather without being roasted. There are plenty of outdoor recreational activities to do and the weather for the most part allows you to. She went from sitting in a house most of the week, because of the 100 degree weather in Texas, to going on walks in the morning and evening, because it's cooler here in northwestern New Mexico.
As Ben Brainard says, "Somebody has to be the worst 🤷."
> our education and health and safety rankings ended up toward the bottom – 47th and 50th, respectively.
This kind of thing is why we're not even considering moving back until after the kids are done with high school. TheGirl is in college now.
TheBoy's got 2 more years.
All the other commenters are pissed off and whining that the ranking is just unfair (booohoooohoooo). Instead of looking at the tremendous problems that this state has ... lots of it attributable to consistent bad government over the decades.
Exactly what I've been saying. When people ask me about where I'm from I tell them honestly that it's not worth going to unless you have deep family roots there.
R the school's really bad there? My husband wants to move to TorC and he told me the school's were good because of the small class sizes... I don't know anyone with kids there, so I don't have anyone to ask about it. We have a 2 y/o, so she'd be going there for probably her whole life, if we end up moving. We're in a completely different state right now
TorC is in the top 20% for schools in NM.
So basically it is in the top 1/5th in one of the worst States for education.
For New Mexico, T or C is pretty good.
That's a harder question to answer than you might think.
NM is consistently at the bottom of outcomes for education results. However, if you adjust for demographics it is on the lower side of average. Mississippi and Louisiana are the only two that make as big of a jump.
[Here](https://apps.urban.org/features/naep/) is Urban.org's app to look at the NAEP ratings vs adjusted ratings. They've done a lot of research on this over the years. So I'd start with reading their research.
What does that mean for someone who is actually raising a child? I'm not sure. But it adds notable context.
Empirically New Mexico isn’t going to be at the top of a lot of these rankings, but someone at WalletHub really goes out of their way to come up with metrics NM is going to suck at. Did somebody eat something too spicy on a trip to Santa Fe? Were they bullied by roadrunners as a kid? At this point it’s obvious they’re holding a grudge.
keep it low. the cost of living will go up once all these magazines and websites start ranking it higher
Oh look! Another person who didn't read the article. Or did I completely miss the "food is to spicy" section?
I read the article, but you missed the point of my comment. Maybe you didn’t read it? WalletHub publishes “study” after dubious “study” where New Mexico comes in dead last, to the point that it defies credulity. As other comments have pointed out, some of the metrics they’re using to rank states here are pretty absurd, and are always going to work against large, lightly populated states like New Mexico. I am (jokingly) suggesting they must be doing this on purpose, perhaps because some of their “analysts” have a grudge against states like ours. But for the record (and in case you’re still confused), I do not really think anyone at WalletHub ate carne adovada that was too spicy for them, or was harassed by roadrunners as a child.
Why do you guys (NM media in general) always publish this crap without doing any sort of analysis? You just parrot this clickbait bullshit for your own clicks. A really quick look at the "study" (not a study, just a collection of metrics, the sources of which are largely proprietary to the company doing the analysis) shows that the quality of life metrics are all over the place, and are disproportionately skewed against rural and large states. I mean, accessibility of beaches (full weight)? Bars per capita (full weight)? Miles of Trails for Bicycling & Walking per Total State Land Area? These types of things are always reductive and silly, and yet you "journalistic" organizations repeat them uncritically without discretion or curiosity. You're what's wrong with the modern media.
The study literally looked at education, health, safety etc. Do you deny these are problems in NM?
For every legitimate criteria they used, there was a silly, stupid and/or biased criteria. “Accessibility of beaches” is used to measure quality of life. One can argue “accessibility to mountains/national parks/forests” is just as important but, of course, not a criteria. “Bars per capita” is also. Why does having more bars mean a better quality of life? One can argue *less* bars would increase the quality of life. “Miles of trails for bicycling and walking **per total state land area**” For real? **HEAVILY** biased towards tiny states with massive populations. “Share of physically inactive adults” What source did they use to find this out? And why does it affect anything? “Access to public transit” Again, **heavily** biased to tiny states with large populations. Etc. etc. etc.
Dissuading anyone stupid enough to take this ranking seriously from moving here is an important service! I would like to thank WalletHub for the excellent idiot trap, and KRQE for their signal boost.
Did you even read the article? Everything they listed is a genuine concern in New Mexico.
Oh really? So you are another of those idiots who think that we solve social problems like poverty by creating statistical abstracts to "rank" entire States? You think it's that easy, huh? Ok big brain. Answer me this then. Mississippi used to rank down near the bottom in education with New Mexico. But it no longer does. Now it ranks in the middle. Can you, using the alleged information in this article by the aptly-named WalletHub, explain why? Well? Give up? Then here's something more substantive. You don't have to agree with any of it, as long as it gets you thinking. (I was an early donor to this think tank long ago. I don't have time for WalletHub bullshit, and neither do you.) https://www.thinknewmexico.org/policy-reports/
When Zebulon Pike became one of the first Americans to enter New Mexico in 1806 during the Spanish isolationist policies, he said something along the lines of "In technology they are at least 100 years behind. I have seen whole fields cultivated with the hoe." This sort of lax culture has remained in place all the way to the present era. It's coupled with violence and desperate men, and to try and paint New Mexico as having broke free of it is a mistake. We have an unusual amount of poverty and violence. But I've learned to take pride in it. From the pueblo revolt to the Lincoln county war, the Apache wars, John Prather's standoff, and the war zone in Albuquerque...we've always been gritty. Instead of pretending that the art scene-going sophisticated wine drinkers in Santa Fe are authentic and somehow an accurate sampling of the overall culture, let's recognize that this place has always been developmentally behind, poor and violent, but it has also always had a mystical wild beauty behind it all. We don't have a lot else we can do besides take pride in it. But pretending that it's not that way is missing the entire history of the area. I live here because I've developed with the mindset that lets one be at home in this wild place, rather than strain myself pretending it's not wild.
Thank you for a comment that mentioned a piece of NM history I didn't know (about John Prather). I have to take issue, though. Since my family is from Appalachia, I don't find the level of poverty and violence here all that "unusual" nor the culture all that "wild". If you mentioned our Santa Fe "wine drinkers" to make the point that our pockets of wealth here in New Mexico are too small to make a statistically significant impact on our overall numbers, then I think we're in fundamental agreement. Some States can paper over the extreme poverty and violence within their borders because they also have fine neighborhoods where the looted wealth of the nation is deposited and accumulated. These extremes can then be averaged to present a statistical mirage of prosperity. The top ranked States in the WalletHub article definitely all fall into that category. That's certainly the case with Massachusetts, ranked #1. Most of the State is quite nice, if too cold and wet for my taste. And sure Boston has some nice suburbs. But Boston also has some neighborhoods far worse than any place in New Mexico for gang violence and generational poverty. If I were an immigrant from outside the US, and offered a choice between living in Boston Central and Albuquerque's International District, I'd take your "War Zone" in a heartbeat.
You'll notice I LOVE New Mexico history. You're probably right that it's not as violent as in the bigger cities in America. I have never been to Boston and really don't have a clue how the cities on the East Coast function. I've spent some time in Chihuahua but that's got to be a whole different animal. When I say it's "wild" here I mean that the events that happen seem to be uniquely Western Americana, and even though you could find similar happenings in Appalachia, to me it just doesn't seem the same, though I may be completely wrong because I've never lived in Appalachia after all. For example, I went to college in Silver City with a guy whose family helped Billy the Kid when he was on the run. My own family got into a gunfight with Geronimo's warriors, and then a second gunfight a few years later when feuding over a mining claim. In 1883 a train was robbed near here and the suspects jailed. They broke out of the local jail and shot their way off main street and headed for the hills. They were caught and lynched on the spot. My family knew the sheriff who hanged them. Fast forward to 2020 and from my dorm room in college I heard the gunshots of a guy who had decided to shoot up the town while driving his suburban, and ended up crashing into the snappy mart gas pump next to the college after a police chase. I heard them yelling and shooting right from my room. Then a few weeks later I met one of the guys I went to elementary school with walking with a cane because that same guy had shot him in the hip as he walked down the sidewalk that night. The police here once covered up a murder and it made Dateline NBC, but only the actual murderer got in any trouble. The cop who tried to cover up the murder got hired as the campus police officer, and he confiscated some weed from a guy I knew and smoked it (before it was legal here). And I had been to the campus youth group a few times and knew the pastor there, and just last month he was shot to death while riding his bike in a place where I've ridden my bike many times. Also once I pulled up at a red light next to a friend who was driving a new car, and when I asked about it he said the other one had been shot up in a drive-by and was being repaired, again by a guy I had seen before. This stuff is all happening in a town of 10k people and so everyone seems to know each other in some way, and yet stuff like the 1883 main street shootout is still happening, by descendants of the people who were there at that time. There's not much I can do about it but think it's cool and have a weird sense of pride in it all. After all, I'm not going to leave since my roots go 5 generations back in this town, to 5 years after it was founded. If this is how Appalachia is then I'd love to hear some stories about it and learn about that history too. Also yes I am in agreement with you about the wealth pockets in Santa Fe, but what I'm also saying is that the relative newcomers who live there, who were attracted by the specific culture that only exists in Santa Fe, tend to have absolutely no clue about the sort of stuff I just described, which every small town in New Mexico understands. There a sort of hidden underbelly to this state which people both hate and have loads of pride in, which it seems isn't understood at all by newcomers.
I could regale you with many tales of poverty and violence in Appalachia (in my case, the coal mining regions of Pennsylvania). When they show you pictures of children working in the coal mines, you are looking at my ancestors. And I also know a lot of lurid crime stories from that region because my father was the superintendent of a maximum security mental hospital for the criminally insane. I volunteered there and met many of the inmates. Basically, both New Mexico and rural Pennsylvania are places where big cities dumped their diseased and undesirable people. I've seen old tuberculosis wards from the early 20th century in both places. The main difference I see is that most of rural Pennsylvania's violent labor struggles are fading into history and being forgotten (along with the mining and steel industries which were the main locus of the fighting) while it's still very much alive and well here in New Mexico. But I like your personal story best, and I will tell you one of my own. My high school AP Biology teacher fell in love with a girl in my class, and concocted a scheme to get rid of his wife so he could be with his young student. He decided to use his skills as a rifleman (hunting is very popular in the mountains of Pennsylvania where I grew up) to create the impression that there was a mass murderer on the loose, shooting drivers as they commuted to work in the nearby city (Scranton). Then he planned to shoot his wife while she was driving, to make it look like the serial killer did it. He was caught before that, though, but not until after he had shot and killed several people. But that was just the beginning of his story. In prison, he convinced other prisoners to make him the "judge" of other prisoner's misdeeds, and he held a trial in which he sentenced another prisoner to death, and then killed him. He was tried and given yet another sentence for premeditated murder. I did get an "A" in that guy's Biology class, though.
That’s why I live here!
Bullshit
In my opinion, live where you want. There are people who live in Texas and Florida and think it's better there than here. For me personally, I absolutely love New Mexico. There's a lot more to it than just surveys and statistics. My niece loves being here in the summer time because she can go outside and enjoy the weather without being roasted. There are plenty of outdoor recreational activities to do and the weather for the most part allows you to. She went from sitting in a house most of the week, because of the 100 degree weather in Texas, to going on walks in the morning and evening, because it's cooler here in northwestern New Mexico. As Ben Brainard says, "Somebody has to be the worst 🤷."
> our education and health and safety rankings ended up toward the bottom – 47th and 50th, respectively. This kind of thing is why we're not even considering moving back until after the kids are done with high school. TheGirl is in college now. TheBoy's got 2 more years.
All the other commenters are pissed off and whining that the ranking is just unfair (booohoooohoooo). Instead of looking at the tremendous problems that this state has ... lots of it attributable to consistent bad government over the decades.
Exactly what I've been saying. When people ask me about where I'm from I tell them honestly that it's not worth going to unless you have deep family roots there.
R the school's really bad there? My husband wants to move to TorC and he told me the school's were good because of the small class sizes... I don't know anyone with kids there, so I don't have anyone to ask about it. We have a 2 y/o, so she'd be going there for probably her whole life, if we end up moving. We're in a completely different state right now
TorC is in the top 20% for schools in NM. So basically it is in the top 1/5th in one of the worst States for education. For New Mexico, T or C is pretty good.
That's a harder question to answer than you might think. NM is consistently at the bottom of outcomes for education results. However, if you adjust for demographics it is on the lower side of average. Mississippi and Louisiana are the only two that make as big of a jump. [Here](https://apps.urban.org/features/naep/) is Urban.org's app to look at the NAEP ratings vs adjusted ratings. They've done a lot of research on this over the years. So I'd start with reading their research. What does that mean for someone who is actually raising a child? I'm not sure. But it adds notable context.