Louisiana policy-makers, businesses, and citizens are laughing all the way to the economic development and social livability banks even as a leftist news organization misreads the room.

Last week, cable business channel CNBC peddled two indices of where states rank. One overall index, alleging to capture state economic performance, put the state 46^th, citing its heavy reliance on federal dollars that may shrink – partly a consequence of the stupefying decision to expand Medicaid a decade ago at the behest of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards – tariffs, and slow economic growth.

The other was a subset of the first, supposedly capturing quality of life, which factors into about a ninth of the overall. Here, the state ranked a place worse, with Vermont on top and Tennessee on bottom.

That should tip off readers that this particular category, and thus, to a lesser extent, the overall list, is unmoored from reality. Reading the fine print helps to explain why. Reading the fine print helps to explain why. In the quality of life category, CNBC includes as positives “inclusivity” and pro-abortion laws, begging the questions of how greater ease in killing the unborn, allowing children to be mutilated, and creating inequity for females in sports, among other things, are positive policy preferences.

Removing the points for this nonsense only changes Louisiana’s overall ranking five places, and several other states also move up the ranks at the expense of other states that scored higher in this category. Clearly, recent gains in the state’s economic fortunes after eight years under Edwards that featured stagnation, if not retrenchment, will have to continue and will take time to show steady upward progress.

Clearer measurements that are less susceptible to noise come from other statistics, such as state gross domestic product growth and population growth. The former clearly captures economic fortunes, while the latter serves as a good proxy for quality of life, because clearly people will move to states that promise them a better life and move away from those that don’t.

These illuminate more clearly that Louisiana has made much more progress than leftist-based indices will admit. For the latest year for which data is available, Louisiana gained in population for the second straight year, reversing the six-figure net outflow under Edwards. And in the last quarter for which there is data, the state not only was one of the best performers in growth, but in the latest month available, also set a record for the number of nonfarm jobs, surmounting a record set prior to Edwards’ terms.

In part, that came from massive industrial expansion during the first two years of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s tenure. Often, that source of jobs and growth, when it comes from a surge in construction, as has occurred after Landry assumed office, proves temporary and may last a year or two. However, in this case, that might go on for some time. This week, Meta announced that it planned to go all the way with its Hyperion data center east of Monroe, building it out to its full 5-gigawatt capacity.

This means that what started out as a $10 billion project, that became a $27 billion seeking 2 GW power usage completed in 2030, now will keep expanding to the entire 5 GW capacity by 2032, injecting $50 billion into the economy, much of it pumped into the state. That means six more years of job creation by the construction sector. Other centers elsewhere in the state are in the works, with a key tax credit for which Landry and others stumped ready to encourage more such development lasting through 2029.

(And, believe the hype that this is a game-changer for northeast Louisiana. Last month I was driving back home through Monroe on a weekday. Years ago, except for Louisville Avenue and maybe U.S. Highway 165, there was no such thing as rush hour traffic. As I approached the Pecanland Mall exit on an increasingly congested Interstate 20 not long after 5 p.m., I suddenly had to come screeching to a halt where it became a parking lot. For the next 45 minutes, in all stop-and-go traffic, I crawled the 5 miles or so, basically crossing U.S. 165 in the process, to the bridge over the Ouachita River, where traffic finally began picking up a bit. It was data center traffic merging with highway travelers and Monroe traffic.)

Oh, and how did the alpha and omega on the CNBC quality of life index fare on these measures? Tennessee’s population grew proportionally more than did most states, and its economy posted middling growth compared to others, while Vermont’s economy barely grew and it lost residents. But, hey, there at least you can kill the unborn with impunity, lop off or sew up minors’ genitalia on demand, and punish private schools who eschew letting biological males run roughshod over biological females in youth competitions.

Finally, a research project at Tulane University last month also ranked Louisiana lowly, dead last, in an attempted global overview of the states. While less ideologically determined than the CNBC efforts, it also suffered from some invalid indicators, principally its inclusion of a measure of greenhouse gases emitted in the state – which is a prime component of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming mythology but in reality means little in the overall scheme of understanding global temperature variation – and a related indicator that polled people about their “trust in science” – which deservedly has taken a beating in recent years precisely because of the bankruptcy of the CAGW religion and politicization of the overkill Wuhan coronavirus pandemic response, so such a shaky measure conceptually reveals nothing.

To summarize these assessments: garbage in, garbage out, making them suspect in telling us much useful.