This thing popped on YouTube a couple of days ago and it already has more than half a million views, so we thought we’d give it a share here. It’s a pretty good history lesson on Louisiana’s founding and everything after, and it talks about the Mississippi River’s paradox – namely, that the Mississippi literally built South Louisiana and is now trying to kill it economically.

And the history lesson is pretty good – right up to the point where it blames “Cancer Alley” and the “pollution” of the chemical plants along the river for the state’s brain drain. Anybody who works in those plants can tell you they’re the most heavily-regulated on the planet. To be fair, though, the narrator focuses more on the perception of pollution as a negative than the pollution itself, and he does have a point that people don’t generally want to live next to a chemical plant.

On the other hand, nobody really does live next to those chemical plants along the river. At one point there was a vibrant community in North Baton Rouge outside the gates of the Exxon refinery, but now it’s a slum. And downriver, for the most part the populated areas are well back of the plants along the waterfront. The people who make noise about “Cancer Alley” are generally out of state, or they’re in the wealthy parts of New Orleans or Baton Rouge. And there are a few local communists in the River Parishes – the noisiest ones seem to be in St. James Parish – who complain about the chemical plants without noting that in most cases the plants were there before they were.

In any event, the “Cancer Alley” thing is the kind of canard that you’ll believe if you read the New York Times and think the stories it tells are accurate. As an impediment to economic growth it isn’t just overblown, it’s the opposite – when Louisiana has had economic development wins over the past 20-30 years it’s generally been the petrochemical sector that has led the way, and now with the firing-up of the liquified natural gas industry as a major American export, petrochemical plants and LNG export terminals are probably the state’s best prospects for quick job generation.

So that’s our major quibble with this video.

That said, this has an excellent discussion of Huey Long and the normalization of political corruption which is the real reason why the state is stagnant. And a good discussion of the “Dutch disease” that infected the state – namely, the fact that for so long the oil and gas industry gave Louisiana an economic crutch which allowed poor leadership to fail at the basics of governance without consequences. And it didn’t even blame global warming or the oil companies for the loss of the state’s marshland – it relied on basic geology and hydrology for that explanation, which is correct.

Oh, well. Can’t get everything right. The video gets Louisiana mostly correct, and the lessons it offers about the effect political corruption will have on the long-term economic prosperity of a place are well worth reviewing.

The YouTube account producing this thing is Geography by Geoff, a project of Portland-based digital creator Geoff Gibson. The account boasts more than 900,000 subscribers on YouTube and has produced 465 videos so far.