When it comes to the presidential election things are definitely nationalized, but we've seen in this iteration (and in the midterms) that senate, governor, and even house races are still about local and state politics. That's why swing-state senators did a lot better than Kamala did (or Biden would have) as an example. 

Utah and Alaska are pretty developed states. Only about .06 points and .04 points less developed than New York and California respectively on HDI. (.931 for Alaska and Utah vs. .937 for New York and .935 for California)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_Human_Development_Index_score

Overall, there doesn't seem to be a positive correlation between HDI and Gini coefficients. If anything, it is a slight negative correlation (higher HDI => lower Gini Coefficients.) 

And similar is visible with GDP per Capita vs. Gini. 

So being "financially developed" can't be the explanation because the most financial developed countries tend to be more egalitarian, not less. 

I think these macroeconomic indicators have a lagging effect when it comes to perceptions. People are thinking about the last few years. So that is why despite inflation rates and Gini Coefficients peaking in 2021-2022 people are backlashing now. The problem is that Democrats can't be reacting from election to election. They need long-term plans of how they want to transform American society. Especially as the ostensibly "left-wing" party. Republicans have long-term plans through the likes of the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation. Democrats, on the other-hand, are very reactive due to a few decades of being institutionally conservative (preserving of American institutions) and have been stuck in a strategy of "triangulation" since Bill Clinton made it work in the 90's. But it's no longer the 90's. They need to have a positive vision for Americans, push as hard as possible to achieve it, and don't flip flop reactively like they have been. They also need to use examples of how they bettered states and localities as models for what they want to do for the nation as a whole. 

Eh, I think that doesn't really pass the smell test. I mean, you can throw numbers at me all day, but I just don't see how Alaska and NY are all that comparable by basically any eye test. Like, I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but it feels like you are boiling things down way too hard into numbers instead of taking a step back and looking at what you are making the data say. I appreciate how hard you are going with the numbers to back up your posts so I don't want to just brush them off and say "but it feels like you're wrong", but it's hard not to. Like, part of the reason Alaska has high wages for jobs that have lower wages elsewhere is that Alaska sucks most of the time so people don't want to live there, so supply/demand sets minimum wages higher. That isn't something California or NY can really replicate. 

So I can't really get behind the idea that income disparity can really be compared between states in a very meaningful way, and I definitely can't get behind the idea that inequality is something that blue states should necessarily seek to remove. I think it is far more complicated than that. An economy can still do well for it's lowest earners while being inequal and vice versa. I don't think California should necessarily seek to equality-max, because I feel the quickest way to do that would be to fundamentally restructure its economy in a way which kills high income jobs (by design). What it should seek to do imo is leverage those high income earners to make life better for low income earners. 

That is all good and all, but when you suggest two political-economies can't be compared, especially on basic, generalized macroeconomic metrics like income distributions typically you have to consider a reason why they can't be compared. Why are we able to compare New York (or the U.S) to Finland (and yes we do make these comparisons all the time) on say education but not to Alaska or Utah on income distribution? 

Alaska isn't more egalitarian because rich people don't want to live there. It is famously a getaway for a specific type of rich person. You could argue poor people don't want to live there, but again there are plenty of poor people too who have lived there for generations. 

Or on the other-hand, it could be that things like the Alaska permanent fund, and other social ownership policies (largely relating to natural resources) do have an effect on income distributions. In the case of Utah, there is a de-facto two-layer welfare state in the form of the actual state insurances + mormon church, and for years they had a housing first policy for houselessness. 

And yes, maxing out equality at any other cost isn't a good idea, but: 

1. Other developed countries (and states) have shown us that you can be a lot more equal than New York and California are and still have high GDPs/HDIs and better off working classes. This includes states and cou tries with a variety of economies, natural resources, and populations. 

2. The Democratic Party is ostensibly the party that argues for egalitarianism and egalitarian income/wealth policies. 

3. Your point that these can still be good places for the poor to live despite the high level of inequality has fewer exemplars and I am not convinced that the working class is better off in New York, as an example, than neighboring states that are less unequal. Often this is directly because of policy too.

As an example, New York has had a famously anemic unemployment insurance benefit compared to its neighbors , despite having areas with a much, much higher cost of living.* Why is the maximum benefit in New York less than that in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania? Why is California's less than that found in Wyoming, Kentucky, and Texas? 

The actual answer to all of this is that California and New York have historically been economically conservative states compared to many other states (all but the deep south really.). When the GOP shifted to a hard cultural conservative stance over the 80's-00's these states also shifted more heavily Democratic, but many of their conservative economic policies weren't changed as Democrats shared fiscal conservatives with the GOP. The fiscal conservatives in the Democratic party undermine the more active, change-oriented parts of that party limiting what economic issues can be addressed and how.

*I noticed this when my father was getting a (slightly) smaller unemployment benefit in New York than I was in Pennsylvania during Covid, despite him making 1.5 as much (before becoming unemployed) as I did at the time, meanwhile his cost of living was double.

Edit: Just looked the 2024 number up, Pennsylvania's max unemployment benefit is $604 per week vs. New York's of $504 per week and California's of $450 per week.

Elon, the free speech warrior, chooses who you can follow now.

Just another day in corporate America.

It's not just Musk, Meta, Google, Microsoft all the same. Most my comments on You Tube instantly get removed, I see dead links to FaceBook and Instagram all the time on AlJazeera. Microsoft just fired more people for speaking up against Azure's involvement.

Meanwhile the hatred against Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians goes unchecked on these platforms. But you can't criticize Israel or even mention Palestine, genocide or Zionism.

All big tech is complicit.

Well, I think there are also serious drawbacks to comparing the education systems between NY and Finland haha

Again, I feel like you can just look at the two states (NY and Alaska) and see the significant differences, but I'll try to break it down a bit more. I would describe an economy here as being certain central industries and the more ubiquitous ones that rise up around them. For example, I grew up in a Fishing town, so Fishing would be the central industry, but of course you still had the ubiquitous restaurants, grocery stores, drug stores, etc. I think those pillars of the economy define a lot about the shape of that economy and the pillars of each of these states are very different. 

Pillars of NY's Economy: Finance, Health Care, Technology, Real Estate.

Pillars of Alaska's Economy: Mining, Oil and Gas, Fishing.

So, what does this mean for each of these economies? NY is largely based around "high-skill" jobs which inherently puts a large gap between those workers and the individuals working the more ubiquitous support positions. Alaska on the other hand, tends to be built around more labor heavy jobs which require a lot less education but still command solid compensation (though not to the level of a lot of a lot of New York jobs). This doesn't really leave those who aren't working those positions behind, while also allowing those without significant schooling to acquire solid wages. This can be seen if you look at the Mean income in the wealthies tax brackets in each state. NY sees far higher mean incomes, upwards of $500k, while AK doesn't crack $200k. I see this as a consequence of the different stuctures of these economies moreso than, say, tax codes. High Skill economies put a wider gap between those who are involved in those pillar industries and those in the support industries than labor economies.

While you can certainly criticize either economy for a variety of reasons, I don't think avoiding high-skill economies is a solution to the problems areas like NY are facing (which is what I was saying earlier, where I think the "solution" needs to exist in the context of the reality of the economy and not ask for a restructuring of these economies from high-skill to labor (although labor does play a part in all economies)). 

I also wanted to circle back a bit to what I was saying earlier: "As for Gini index, I feel that just that graph demonstrates some pretty substantial limitations. States which are more financially developed will naturally have more inequality as there will be a higher percentage of high earners and their economies will be more dependent on those high earners. "

I said this largely because it felt like common sense. You posted some data indicating that it was not correct, which I've been struggling to entirely square as it feels somewhat counter-intuitive. While writing this post, I found a couple sources echoing my original thoughts (to a degree) so I dug a bit further and this is what I found:

I'd also just like to reiterate, I agree with a lot of what you are saying so if I didn't address something you said, it's probably because I agree. I think being "less inequal than we currently are" is generally a good goal. I think if New York reduced inequality, it would probably be a good thing (assuming it didn't do so by weakening it's economy). But, I think there are serious drawbacks to comparing different areas, as contexts play a huge role in these figures and the reasons inequality may be higher or lower in one area may not be able to be extrapolated out to other areas. For example, we talk about New York a lot, but it's worth noting that Gini varies wildly across the state even though they deal with a lot of the same state level policies you are talking about, because of how the economies in different geographical regions are made up. 

Topic 1: Sector-based distribution effect on inequality

While I think sector-distributions do explain a part of it (which is why I originally mentioned Utah, a far less rural state than Alaska with similar sector distributions to New York), I think there is a bit unaccounted for when you look at the proportions by major sector between Alaska and New York State. They follow the trends you mentioned, but not extremely so. 

In 2022, roughly 22% of the Alaskan population worked in the Production, Transportation, & Material Moving Occupations and Natural resources, construction, & maintenance occupations sectors. Source: https://datausa.io/profile/geo/alaska?measureOccupations=workforce&measureWorkforceGeomap=wage&measureWorkforcePyramid=wage

This was the average wage for each of those groups. 

In comparison, New York state's distribution. 

And the average wages. 

The biggest difference seems to be in the relative pay rates of the various sectors. Professional-managers are paid significantly higher in New York, whereas non-professional-managerial positions are paid roughly the same or higher in Alaska. Still professional-managers/knowledge workers are the most plural sector in both states. 44.5% for New York and 37.8% for Alaska. 

If you look at Utah, a much more urban state than Alaska, you see this: 

This looks a lot more like New York's, with a ratio-pay of 1.45 for (professional-managerial worker to natural-resource worker) for Utah vs. New York's of 1.55, and Alaska's 1.08. 

The distributions aren't that far apart either (41% professional-managerial for Utah vs. 44.5% for New York, 8.8% Natural Resources for Utah vs. 6.65% for New York.) 

Utah also has a worse ratio-pay between professional-managerial and service work than New York. 2.33 times the pay being a prof-manager over a service worker (for Utah) vs. 2.12 times the pay (for New York.) 

Yet Utah's Gini Coefficient is 44% and New York's is 51%. That is a very significant difference that can't fully be explained by sector-distributions alone, in my opinion. Especially given how little differentiation there is between the distributions of Utah and New York, unlike Alaska and New York. 

Also, this is irrelevant to the discussion, but if you adjusted the wages for PPP, you should probably multiply Utah's by about 1.2 and Alaska's by 1.1 to get rough "real wages" when comparing them with New York. 

Topic 2: Papers shared 

Looking at the first paper you shared I think a clarification needs to be made. I wasn't aiming to argue that in the U.S, inequality isn't growing more rapidly in large cities, but rather that this isn't some characteristic of large cities in themselves by the nature of being large or developed, but rather the effect of policy implementations since the neo-liberal era started (roughly the late 70's/early 80's) and after the New Deal era (early 30s-early 70's) ended. The paper's authors themselves note that it hasn't always been true that the largest cities in the country were the most unequal.

The paper's authors then emphasize that this is largely because the strong differentiation between so-called "skilled workers" and "lesser-skilled workers" when it came to wage-growth didn't exist in the past. 

But what are the causes for why wage growth has stagnated among the so-called "lesser-skilled" workers? The paper mentions globalization, but it's hardly the only change that happened between the New Deal era and the Neo-Liberal era. Other factors that came into play are the decline of unions and collective bargaining, the flight of middle-income earners outside of urban cores, technological development shaped by state and federal grants, etc., etc. All of these are directly and indirectly caused by policies that politicians, regulatory agencies, legislatures, and judiciaries enact, enforce, and interpret. 

Interestingly, the model in the second paper doesn't agree with the skill-based assessment of the first. Which goes to show how hard social science is. 

And here they reiterate it. 

Personally, I find the first paper to be a bit more rigorous than this second one. I'm skeptical of their definition of "financial development." 

Their definition of "financial development" is this, 

This metric seems to be capturing wealth concentration more than financial development to me. By using per capita stock market wealth they are ignoring many non-stock financial devices that might reduce income-inequality rather than increase it. For example, the credit market and access to cheap credit. Also high-inequality can be the cause of a higher ratio of per capita stock market wealth to nominal per capita personal income, rather than the latter being a cause of the inequality. 

If they wanted a stand-in for production, which it seems to be the reasoning for using this metric, why didn't they just use GDP per capita held in the financial sector in general? 

Isn't Alaska the place with something that is the closest program to actual Universal Basic Income? Ah, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

A 2024 paper in Poverty & Public Policy found that the Alaska Permanent Fund "reduced the number of Alaskans with incomes below the US poverty threshold by 20%–40%" and "reduced poverty rates of rural Indigenous Alaskans from 28% to less than 22%".

That reduction in poverty is what the Gini index reflects. California and New York have a lot of poverty. Which is reflected by their Gini index.

Given that, Alaska is the most socialist of the US states. Leftist not in words but in actual policy. Populist leftist to be precise, not the modern Twitter leftist stuff.

The situation of the democratic party may still have some impact, the rumour mill is starting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSWy1r4Du_0

In my opinion, that data is not adequately subdivided for our purposes. Throwing 45% of the population into the same extremely broad bucket makes it difficult to really see what is going on. Unfortunately, the census data that it pulls from is subdivided to oblivion and I'm not going to do the work to pool it, so I'll be using BLS numbers for a bit (the data isn't quite Goldilocks as I would prefer a little more subdivision, but it's pretty good imo).

This is a table I made using BLS data (so let me know if you see any data entry or math errors or if you don't understand what different bits mean). I feel like this demonstrates the differences in these economies pretty well.

-Alaska has far more Mining/Logging, Construction and Government jobs (with 66x more Mining/Logging jobs than NY) which I would say tend to be pretty good jobs (which often require less education), but you aren't usually going to get rich with them. 

-New York on the other hand sees double the jobs in Information and Finance and about 1.5x more in Professional/Business and Education/Health Care. These tend to be more "high skill" jobs, which require more education and often have far higher pay ceilings. This tendency towards "high skill" jobs also shows up in the educational attainment in these two states, with NY having a pretty substantial amount more individuals with Bachelors and Masters degrees. 

-These trends are pushed even further when looking specifically at the NYC area (this data includes some NYC suburbs in NJ). Fewer construction jobs (this data combines Mining/Logging with Construction, which I suspect is likely because there are too few jobs in Mining/Logging to allow accurate tracking), manufacturing jobs, and Government jobs and even more jobs in Info, Finance, Business and Health Care/Education. 

That said, yes, a lot of jobs exist in a common zone which I described before as the more "ubiquitous" jobs like grocery store clerk and whatnot. There's a lot of these jobs, but I wouldn't personally say they really drive an economy's character but instead exist to respond to the demands of the larger economy.

Further, when you look at the actual pay of jobs in NY/AK, you start to see some interesting trends (Note: Cost of Living Index is pretty similarly high for both NY and AK, although likely for very different reasons). You mentioned this in your post that relative pay-rates are higher in NY and I do agree with that finding. From perusing the data, it seems low pay jobs pay about the same in NY vs AK, while a lot of high pay jobs (outside of Health Care it seems) pay way more in NY than AK. This, combined with the zip code earnings data I provided earlier, indicates to me that the pay ceiling is far higher in NY than in AK, while also demonstrating that the Finance and Business jobs in NY are pulling a lot more on NY's Gini than they are pulling on AK's. If there were fewer of these high pay ceiling jobs, even without improving the conditions for those at the bottom, NY's Gini would decrease. 

So, to summarize, NY (and especially NYC) has a lot more "high-skill" jobs with very high income ceilings, while AK has a lot more "laborer" jobs and government jobs which have a solid pay floor, but not the highest ceiling. NY also sees higher pay for those "high-skill" jobs which further emphasizes these differences. This contributes to an economy with a much higher Gini in NY than in AK as a result of these employment characteristics. 

Now, why am I not talking about Utah? Well, first of all, I'm exhausted just talking about two states, but more than that, my point isn't that New York isn't comparable to any other state or that NY is actually doing great. My point is more akin to something you said in your post: Social science is hard. I have concern about using numbers like Gini in a broad way as there is a lot of context pulling at those numbers. I don't just mean to be pedantic in this point, because I think it reflects a very real disagreement I have with the Far-Left. I do not believe we are at a point in which the existing contexts of our economic system must be dismantled for equality's sake. I believe that we can strive to improve within existing contexts.

I don't believe it is functionally realistic to expect NYC to have a Gini as low as, say Schuyler County in NY (which, for comparison, NYC has a Gini around .6 compared to Schuyler's 0.38). I do however believe that NYC can improve it's economic inequality relative to itself in order to better provide for those at the bottom, specifically by leveraging it's strength of having a lot of high income individuals (although a lot of these changes are much easier with Federal support). Now, even if NY reaches that point where they have largely succeeded in their aims to provide stability and dignity for those in lower income brackets, they will likely still have a higher Gini than a lot of other places in the country. This isn't necessarily something to damn them for. While there are certainly lessons that can be learned from these different areas, the contexts they exist in differ so we should not necessarily expect parity, especially when it comes to Gini, which doesn't necessarily reflect the economic strength of those lower income brackets.