Fox Cable is better entertainment than the cartoon shows on Saturday
mornings.
So on almost any given Saturday you can catch me in front of my flat screen chuckling as I watch the business bloc on the fair-and-balanced news channel. I just sit back with my morning coffee in hand and laptop within reach and enjoy a steady stream of right-wing platitudes and pseudo-business banter masquerading as thoughtful analysis.
It’s hard to really say which of the four business shows I find funniest but if I had to choose, it’d probably be Forbes on Fox. Steve Forbes is a self-appointed regular panelist on the show.
Yes, Steve Forbes, the goofy-looking guy with the oddball flat tax platform, who got roundly rejected by GOP voters in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and 2000. He’s the guy who was smart enough and industrious enough to pick billionaire Malcolm Forbes for his father, therefore assuring that he’d be super-rich for life.
The show also features other Forbes Magazine editors, each one expressing cutting-edge political thought and business analysis straight out of the mid-20th Century.
So when I read that Forbes Magazine had published a pointless list of America’s Most Miserable Cities, I was not surprised to find Chicago, New York and Los Angeles in the top 10.
Forbes is funny that way.
If the 15 million people living in those three cities were half as smart as the Forbes editors and had any idea how miserable they were, why they’d move to somewhere like Darien, Connecticut or Pierce City, Missouri.
Since I live in Chicago, between snickers, I gave the Forbes list a little thought. The first thing I noticed was that nine out of the 10 most miserable cities just happen to be in blue states.
Before the second thought occurred to me, I ran across Sheeple Herder’s Weblog which lists the top 10 cities on the Forbes Most Miserable Cities list while providing some U.S. Census Bureau racial statistics along with them. Here’s the rundown:
Detroit, MI = 89% Non-White: Black 83%, Hispanic 6%
Stockton, CA = 48% Non-White: Black 11%, Hispanic 37%
Flint, MI = 59% Non-White: Black, 56% Hispanic 3%
New York, NY = 53% Non-White: Black 25%, Hispanic 28%
Philadelphia, PA = 55% Non-White: Black 44%, Hispanic 11%
Chicago, Il = 63% Non-White:Black 35%, Hispanic 28%
Los Angeles, CA = 59% Non-White: Black 10%, Hispanic 49%
Modesto, CA = 36% Non-White: Black 4%, Hispanic 32%
Charlotte, NC = 45% Non-White: Black 34%, Hispanic 11%
Providence, RI = 52% Non-White: Black 16%, Hispanic 36%
This belongs in the "liars can figures, figures can lie" or "garbage-in, garbage out" column. You can get the results you want by creating a cock-eyed criteria. In Forbes' case, it came to its figures by employing the late economist Arthur Okun's "discomfort index"--which is the sum of unemployment and inflation--and adding weather, crime and toxic waste for good measure.
By throwing in weather, for example, the publication gets to be super subjective, boiling it all down to rather you prefer extreme heat or extreme cold, hurricanes or firestorms. Using Okun's misery index alone and applying it to nations, the U.S. is a more miserable country than Japan, Canada, Germany and Italy.
Apparently the Forbes concoction prefers not to measure in shades of gray. The magazine's bottom line seems to be simply this: If a city is too black and brown, it’s got to be a miserable place to live.
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