Bottom 10 for business

Amid our endless squabbling over culture wars and all matter of political questions, it is worth taking a moment to consider exactly what each of us expects from our governments. On a basic level, we exchange a portion of our resources in the form of taxes and a measure of our freedom expressed as a willingness to obey the law to support governments that offer services and protections we could not obtain as individuals. At a minimum, we expect the government to provide law enforcement, prisons and courts to protect us, schools to educate our children, safe roads, clean water, regular garbage pickup, and a regulatory environment friendly to the private sector.

There are endless variations on this theme at the local, state and national level, but in the simplest terms our relationship with every level of government is transactional. We pay taxes, we obey the law, and in return we expect elected officials to try and make our towns, our states, and our country nice places to live.

The devil, of course, is in the details, and the hardest part of living in a democratic society is that we argue with one another over what constitutes nice, or better, or moral, or any of the other adjectives one might assign to a nation governed by laws that can and do change over time. Are taxes too high or too low? Should public officials get raises? Do we fill the prisons or embrace criminal justice reform? Is registering to vote too hard or too easy? And so on.

These questions matter because we are all biased. We each have a predictable tendency to consider our own political party or favorite politicians successful based on their actions with regard to a handful of emotional issues like abortion, gun control, or immigration (hence the culture wars) rather than evaluating them holistically or empirically. That pattern explains the consistent re-election of failures and incompetents to high office even after years of catastrophic policy choices that discourage economic growth, ruin schools, and destroy health care. It is a pattern that transcends party, one that exists in red and blue states, in big cities and small towns, in wealthy suburbs and downtrodden communities.

The best approach to peering through this veil of ignorant emotional preference is to ask the business community for help. Business leaders may have their own political preferences, but they run companies that exist solely to make money, and their leaders do not care where the money comes from. Put another way, their desire for profit means they do not seek to alienate anyone, and they search for areas to operate where the conditions favor commerce and people want to live and work. In short, businesses are attracted to areas where government is doing its job, and we can therefore judge the success or failure of a given government based in part on its success in attracting business.

And by that standard our state leaders are failing us.

The most recent CNBC annual ranking of the best states for business put Oklahoma at 41st, down from 38th in 2022 and 32nd in 2021. North Carolina ranked No. 1, while neighboring Texas ranked 6th, Kansas came in at 23rd, and Missouri ranked 32nd. All those states have Republican majorities or supermajorities in their state legislatures, so this is not strictly a matter of political partisanship. Instead, it has everything to do with the choices you and I make when we vote for our representatives.

Oklahoma did well in the rankings when it came to cost of living and the cost of doing business overall, but ranked 36th for workforce, 49th for life, health, and inclusion, and 48th for education. In other words, according to CNBC, our schools are terrible, our access to quality health care is bottom of the barrel, our crime rates are too high, and we actively discriminate against women and minorities.

The Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce echoes those concerns. Their 2022 scorecard ranks Oklahoma 39th overall. But their sub-scores are also damning. They rate our state 50th in STEM degree population, 49th in educational attainment, 43rd in quality of schools, 47th in health insurance coverage, and 43rd in population health outcomes.

And the deeper you dive into any sort of data the worse Oklahoma looks. Based on the last census, we have an overall poverty rate of 15.6% (19.2% in Comanche County) while the national average is 11.6%. And median household income in Oklahoma averaged $56,956 between 2017 and 2021 while the national average reached $69,021, a difference of more than 20%.

If you were the CEO of a major corporation considering moving to Oklahoma, would those numbers make the state appealing? Of course not. And that means our state leaders are not doing their job, which is to make Oklahoma a nice place to work and live. And if that is the case, then it is time for us to assign blame, which is an easy thing to do because the Republican Party has dominated Oklahoma politics for more than a decade and has a supermajority in the state Legislature and our rankings have consistently dropped on their watch.

The business community is telling you these truths, and they are not political in any way. Plenty of Republican states rank higher than Oklahoma. The difference between them and us is that they have better schools, better access to health care, higher salaries, and more amenities because they are willing to pay for and support them. It is not rocket science.

Oklahoma has its advantages, particularly when it comes to cost of living, and it is worth remembering that we are talking about averages and about perception here. There are certainly wealthy and successful people in our state, and plenty of nice neighborhoods to live in if you can afford them.

But the numbers do not lie, and no one can argue it will benefit our state if we continue our descent into mediocrity and wind up even lower on these lists in the coming years.

It is something to think about when you vote in 2024.

Lance Janda holds a PhD in History from the University of Oklahoma and has more than 30 years of experience in higher education. He is the author of “Stronger Than Custom: West Point and the Admission of Women”, among other works.