The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an intergovernmental organisation that provides a platform for its 38 member countries to compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practices, and coordinate policies. Its mission is to foster common prosperity and opportunity within the membership community and beyond. In order to do this, the OECD generates and shares lots of data.
Why can’t the US states have their own OECD-like organization? You know, complement all the partisan squabbling with collective problem-solving for the common good? It’s not like this is a new concept in the US; we already have the Big Seven*, a group of organizations that represent local and state governments in the US. But these organizations are limited in scope, output, and financing, some being little more than partisan think-tanks. We need bigger and better, a publicly-funded organization, truly non-partisan, with a huge, growing, and accessible database, generating wide-ranging policy reports on a frequent and reliable basis. Maybe some of the existing organizations could be consolidated and reimagined, or maybe we need to start over with something new. Either way, what we have is not enough, and not good enough.
I got to musing about the OECD out of frustration, after spending hours looking for a comprehensive analysis comparing environmental policies across the US states. I was especially curious whether the rather cold-hearted Republican rhetoric about non-human species was matched by cold-hearted state policies. That turned out to be too big a project, so I settled for info on state environmental budgets (available on Balletopedia). Then I calculated the latest per capita and per square mile environmental spending for a few states, as a rough proxy for how much their governments care about the natural world. This is what I found:
Of course, a one-year snapshot of state spending on the environment isn’t going to tell us much, except that there’s something wrong with Mississippi, and Florida is no slouch in the environmental spending department. And both are Red states.
—
* These are the American Legislative Exchange Council, Council of State Governments, State Government Affairs Council, State Innovation Exchange, State Policy Network, Uniform Law Commission, and National Conference of State Legislatures (my favorite).
Links (all accessed on June 5-6, 2023):
https://ballotpedia.org/Environmental_spending_in_the_50_states
https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/states-by-population/
https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/2010/geo/state-area.html