Wouldn’t it be wonderful if America stopped viewing everything through the lens of race?  That was my primary reaction to Ed Fitzpatrick’s column, today.  It thwarts any balanced understanding of what’s actually going on in the world, but explains quite a lot about the economic and civic problems that grip Rhode Island and the nation.

I’m thinking, in particular, about this paragraph:

… the main reason for the low unemployment rate [in Vermont] is “the diversity issue,” [University of Vermont economics Prof. Arthur] Woolf said. “Vermont doesn’t look like the rest of the nation or even the rest of New England” because “it’s pretty much devoid of minority populations” that have higher-than-average unemployment rates nationwide.

So if we were to switch out some portion of Vermont’s white population with an average proportion of blacks and Hispanics, its unemployment rate would go up?

Nonsense.

Consider this map of Vermont’s population density.  Most of the state has fewer than 40 people per square mile.  Its average is 68.  Fitzpatrick makes much of the contrast between more-socialist Vermont and low-tax New Hampshire, but New Hampshire’s population is more than twice as large in about the same area, with 147 people per square mile.  Roughly speaking, New Hampshire’s economy, with almost the same percentage of farm employment and college education, keeps twice as many people working… with a 21% higher median income.

Rhode Island, by the way, has 1,018 people per square mile.  That might, maybe, perhaps, be a more significant “demographic” consideration than the color of their skin.

As to the political theory, just like an absolute monarch meant something different in an era of slow communication, socialism means something different when everybody’s spread out.  More than half of Vermonters, for example, supply their own drinking water.

Favoring centralized government is quite a different thing when government doesn’t — can’t — control very much.