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[robot_god]

I have to move out of New York, but the licensing for my profession is a bureaucratic mire.  Anyway, to which state should I move?  I visited Oregon but I couldn't find the job I wanted.  I visited Vermont, but the job I wanted fell through.  I think I'm just gonna get a license for Pennsylvania.  Worse comes to worse I can pay to transfer it to most states.

So what is the best state?  The only state that doesn't count, unfortunately is California which would require an extra year of interning.

[KeithHernandez]

I would just say the places herb is basically legal.  I believe those are colorado (woo woo), ohio, alaska and california.

[Bobby Isosceles]

Keith thinks the best state is the state of intoxication.

[Thomas Pain]

best state is state with best quality of life for most number of people.  It's hard to determine quality of life looking at statistics.  Grand Forks ND has one of the highest ratios of college educated people, but, once you get there, you realize it's obviously a midwest college sort of education... it ain't exactly an intellectually focused sort of place.  doh!  I'd recommend maybe some place like Washington state...  sure statistically it rains a lot, but once you get there you realize that it's not a heavy rain.. you can even ride your bike in a light mist... unlike some states where when it rains, it rains cats and dogs and frying pans and stays at 100% humidity for days on end.  I hear that Washington state has a relatively affordable health insurance for low income people...  You might never need it, but many of the people you share the state with will need it.  To the extent that everyone around you has a high quality of life, you will have a higher quality of life.  

[side_show]

Hmm... I've been wondering the same thing, but more because I have a flight voucher to fly to any continental state I would like.  I think I've concluded that my favorite state is the one in which my friend has a beach house on the Gulf of Mexico, but this may be due to the mindset of a Canadian, clouded by the winter weather in January.

[Doc]

I would move to massachusetts because I would never get sick of the boston accent.

[KeithHernandez]

I would just say the places herb is basically legal.  I believe those are colorado (woo woo), ohio, alaska and california.

I would move to massachusetts because I would never get sick of the boston accent.

And Massachusetts.

[jay-ell]

best state is state with best quality of life for most number of people.  It's hard to determine quality of life looking at statistics.  Grand Forks ND has one of the highest ratios of college educated people, but, once you get there, you realize it's obviously a midwest college sort of education... it ain't exactly an intellectually focused sort of place.  doh!  I'd recommend maybe some place like Washington state...  sure statistically it rains a lot, but once you get there you realize that it's not a heavy rain.. you can even ride your bike in a light mist... unlike some states where when it rains, it rains cats and dogs and frying pans and stays at 100% humidity for days on end.  I hear that Washington state has a relatively affordable health insurance for low income people...  You might never need it, but many of the people you share the state with will need it.  To the extent that everyone around you has a high quality of life, you will have a higher quality of life.  

Yeah, I think I would have to agree here. Being a pinko commie and all, I think probably the state that has the most effective social welfare system (not necessarily the most expensive, mind you) would be the best place to live. Combined, perhaps, with a commitment to the protection of civil liberties for all people (gay marriage is a good current barometer of this).

So, best state? Canada. But it's balls-cold there, so I guess I'll stay where I am.

(Cue A-Cap saying that the state the governs best, governs least...)

[side_show]

It's way colder than balls up here.  Waaaaay way colder.

[AugustWest]

What sort of license is it?

[wombat]

Me, I'd head somewhere between Pocatello, Idaho ands Butte, Montana along I-15. But that may not be your thing.

OMG NOOOOOOO.

See, we need to know much more about you and your tastes and priorities to give you reasonable advice.

[jay-ell]

I have to move out of New York, but the licensing for my profession is a bureaucratic mire.  Anyway, to which state should I move?  I visited Oregon but I couldn't find the job I wanted.  I visited Vermont, but the job I wanted fell through.  I think I'm just gonna get a license for Pennsylvania.  Worse comes to worse I can pay to transfer it to most states.

So what is the best state?  The only state that doesn't count, unfortunately is California which would require an extra year of interning.

To get back to the original question, which I completely ignored in my previous post, without knowing your profession I would recommend North Carolina. The urban centers in NC have not been hit as hard as other parts of the country in terms of job loss, though the rural parts of the state (where most of the employment is of the blue-collar, manufacturing variety) have suffered. But Charlotte and the Research Triangle area (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hilll) are doing fairly well economically - compared, at least, to the rust-belt towns where my cousins are scattered. And the Carolinas are pleasant enough - moderate weather, Southern hospitality, etc. And if you are doing anything computer- or education-related, there are plenty of tech and teaching jobs in NC (though the competition is pretty stuff these days).

I have also heard good things about Austin and Houston, but Paul can probably fill you in better on those. I have also heard nice things about Tucson and Phoenix, but I don't know of anyone on this board who currently lives there.

[Bobby Isosceles]

best state is state with best quality of life for most number of people.  It's hard to determine quality of life looking at statistics.  Grand Forks ND has one of the highest ratios of college educated people, but, once you get there, you realize it's obviously a midwest college sort of education... it ain't exactly an intellectually focused sort of place.  doh!  I'd recommend maybe some place like Washington state...  sure statistically it rains a lot, but once you get there you realize that it's not a heavy rain.. you can even ride your bike in a light mist... unlike some states where when it rains, it rains cats and dogs and frying pans and stays at 100% humidity for days on end.  I hear that Washington state has a relatively affordable health insurance for low income people...  You might never need it, but many of the people you share the state with will need it.  To the extent that everyone around you has a high quality of life, you will have a higher quality of life.  

I am partial to Rhode Island myself.

[Thomas Pain]

Combined, perhaps, with a commitment to the protection of civil liberties for all people (gay marriage is a good current barometer of this).

I don't know if legalization of gay marriage is a good barometer of this.  I read an article somewhere (I forget where) to the effect that it may not be.  The reasoning went that gay marriage issue is sort of a perfect storm of hot-button issues for people.  There is currently heavy investment in PR efforts and grass-roots networking efforts which may be helping to (for now at least) keep people from flipping on this issue... but only on this issue in particular... when you look at states with elected officials who are out, you see a different story -- one of increasing acceptance.  So, a better barometer might be the ratio of out officials to state population.  At least with this barometer, you have more data to work with, although there still isn't much.

This map shows the number of out officials in each state:

http://www.glli.org/out_officials

This page gives the population of each state:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population

I ran some of the data into a spreadsheet, and this is what I got:

state / number of out officials / total population (2008) / ratio (times 100,000)

OR    14       3790060          0.369387
WA    35       6549224          0.534414
CA   160      36756666          0.435295
RH     6       1050788          0.571000
FL    28      18328340          0.152769
TX    20      24326974          0.082213
PN    51      12448279          0.409695
NY    46      19490297          0.236015
MA    30       6497967          0.461683
CO    11       4939456          0.222697
DC    66        591833         11.151795
NC     9       9222414          0.097588
DE     6        873092          0.687213

Of course, this is just data, and there is always a more complicated story behind the data.  DC is obviously a pretty weird place due to all of the government employment there.  The quality of life in DC isn't two orders of magnitude better than anywhere else... As of the early 2000's, 4 out of 5 high school students in DC score more than 200 points below the national average on their SATs.  100,000 people in DC live below the poverty line... that's 1 in 6... 

DC aside, I think one thing that will really drive up these numbers is relatively large urban areas... urban areas can, to a point,  drive demographics to be more progressive...  but with urban areas can come other social problems...

I don't think that these numbers are useful comparators when they are generally within the same order of magnitude... the difference between WA and OR for example could simply be due to urban populations... get into rural OR and rural WA and you might find essentially the same attitudes... Maybe OR has a larger ratio of rural to urban population, thereby driving OR's number down?  Certainly, whatever the case is, it doesn't portend well (relatively speaking, anyway.. have a look at texas or NC...) for OR's statewide policy, but the urban areas in OR and WA might be quite similar to one another?  Might not be?  I dunno.  I haven't been up there much.

NC and TX are the lowest in my list here, but they aren't that terribly far off...

I guess to really try to make any sense out of this paucity of data, you'd have to figure out standard deviations and such, to try to figure out what's significant, and by how much.  You'd totally have to write DC off as a special cause variation and not include it in the standard deviation calculation.

I don't really have the firepower or the affection for numbers to do much with this stuff, however.  As it is I crashed firefox trying to cut 'n paste the spreadsheet results. 

[jay-ell]

Wow, that's commitment to your argument, right there. I'm impressed.

I don't think the number of out officials is any better a means of determining which states are more committed to civil liberties, though. In some cities - even major metropolitan areas - the proportion of GLBT to straight is unusually high; in others, it's extraordinarily low. For instance, in Houston, TX, just 4.4 percent of the general population is gay. In San Francisco, the number is over 15%. With a larger pool of gay potential candidates to choose from, it's simply statistically more likely that a gay candidate will successfully run in Frisco than in Houston.

That's why I focused on legislation - what the government is willing to do, rather than who it's composed of. The voting populace may not have the option to vote for an openly gay candidate, or the gay candidate may be legitimately less qualified (or less likeable) than his/her opponent. But if the voters consistently put into office representatives willing to protect the civil liberties of minority groups, the government may legitimately be called progressive even in the absence of significant numbers of minorities in elected positions.

Edited for reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orientation