Lord, his daddy was an honest man, just a red dirt Georgia farmer
His momma lived her short life having kids and baling hay
He had fifteen years and an ache inside to wander
So he hopped a freight at Waycross and wound up in L.A.

Sometimes at dinner time, we have “YouTube Riff-Offs” where one person plays a song on YouTube, Spotify, or some other source, and the next person selects a song that they free associate with the previous. It may be that the first song makes reference to the second song, that they have similar riffs, or simply that they are related in terms of topic or performer.

Friday evening, Fiona started off with some current popular song about someone from Georgia. I don’t remember anything more about the song. Kim then played “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. I remembered a song I listened to a lot when I was younger. I remembered it was Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez singing about a “red dirt Georgia farmer”. With a little searching, I came up with “San Francisco Mabel Joy”.

It is a song with a story and character development. It reflects the complexity of life not often found in pop songs today.

Well the cold nights had no pity on that Waycross Georgia farm boy
Most days he went hungry, then the summer came

Today, a friend shared a link to the New York Times article, Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?

Los Angeles shows up 703 on the list of over 3000 counties. The areas around Waycross Georgia rank near the bottom of the list.

Yet all of this made me stop and wonder, what makes life hard?

A Joni Mitchell song comes to mind,

You read those books where luxury
Comes as a guest to take a slave
Books where artists in noble poverty
Go like virgins to the grave

I’m not going to as far as to suggest that life is harder for the wealthier, although Matthew 19:24 does come to mind. Yet I must question the assumptions made in the New York Times article.

The New York Times article looks at “six data points for each county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity.”

Is the percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree really a good measure of how hard a place is to live? The question too many philosopher majors end up asking comes to mind, “Would you like fries with that?” How significant is a bachelor’s degree in how hard life is?

Median household income is another questionable number. I used to live in Fairfield County, where the median income is listed as $82,614. The median household income for the United States is $53,046. I’m not sure that life is that much easier if you’re making $53,000 or $82,000. In fact, the cost of living in places with higher median incomes makes life harder for those with low paying jobs. Perhaps a better indicator would be percentage of people below some poverty line.

I do agree that unemployment rate, if it properly includes discouraged and underemployed workers, disability rate, and life expectancy work pretty well as indicators of how hard life is, but I’d also question the obesity rate.

Yes, it can be a good indicator of how hard it is to get healthy food, but it may also reflect dietary and lifestyle choices, that while people can argue about how healthy those choices are, don’t necessarily indicate how hard life is.

My eldest daughter, when she was in South America had a guy comment to her about how she wasn’t very skinny. He meant it as a compliment. It indicated that she had access to food.

No, a better metric might be the number of people who go to bed hungry or don’t have access to healthy food.

The New York Times reflects a view of how hard life is based on an individual’s education and earnings. In a few days, people will rush to the stores to by junk which will show how well off they are. Perhaps we need to challenge these assumptions. Yet it is these assumptions that drive stores to advertise in the New York Times, so maybe they have a financial reason to encourage these assumptions.