Claims made by intelligent Alaskans
I am not endorsing these, or claiming these propositions are the entire story, but I heard a number of interesting claims during my trip. Here are a few:
1. Ranked choice voting has worked relatively well for Alaska, by encouraging more moderate candidates.
2. Faculty at U. Alaska are not rabid crazy, because the locale selects for those who are into hunting and fishing, and that keeps them from the worst excesses of academic life.
3. The oil-based “UBI” in Alaska keeps down government spending, because voters feel that any money spent is being spent at their expense.
4. Health care costs are a major problem up here, mostly because there is not enough scale to support many hospitals.
5. When air travel shuts down, due to say ash from Russian volcanos, the local blood bank runs into problems either testing its blood donations or getting out-of-state blood.
6. East Anchorage has perhaps the largest number of languages in its high school student population of anywhere in the United States. Some of this stems from the large number of different kinds of Alaska Natives, some of it stems from having many Samoans, Hawaiians, Hmong, and other migrant groups.
7. Resources for Alaska Natives are often held through the corporate form (with restrictions on share transferability), rather than tribes, and this has worked fairly well.
8. Starlink has had a major impact on the more remote parts of Alaska, which otherwise had internet service not much better than “dial up” quality.
9. For a while there were direct flights from Chengdu to Fairbanks, due to Chinese interest in the “Northern Lights” phenomenon.
10. The population of Anchorage turns over by about ten percent each year, with only some of this being driven by the military.
11. For a human, a moose is a greater risk than a bear.
Personally, I observe that the university in Anchorage is more pro-GPT than other academic groups I have had contact with. Might this be due to their distance from the center, their frontier mentality, and the possible scarcity of skilled labor here?