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California’s demography is at odds with the old California Dream
- systemvoltage 4y agoI live here in Oakland, California and I can attest to what the article is analyzing. There is not a single thing I like about California except weather/natural beauty and SV's dynamism which is fleeting away. Infrastructure and quality of life is in strong decline.
- wahern 4y ago> I think it's fair to say that Silicon Valley is dead. Cheap venture capital, minimal startup cost, access to university researchers, and good inter business communications fueled an engine which turned ideas into products. You can now find venture capital elsewhere, with the discount rate being what it is. The cost of housing and office space has spiraled out of control, thanks to the environmentalists and Prop 13. The trade secrets and intellectual property mania have pretty much destroyed open cooperation. The universities remain, but aren't the driving force they used to be. > The place has a much different, more ossified feel to it than it did seven years ago. Paul Flaherty, alt.folklore.computers, March 11, 1993, "Re: Sillycon Valley history" (Message-ID: <paulf.731874319@abercrombie.Stanford.EDU>)
- thatoneguy 4y agoYeah, there is a lot history of people calling the Bay Area over and the Bay Area always wins. It shows up even in fiction with those two cops in Vertigo complaining about how San Francisco had changed since the late 19th or early 20th century and how it sucks now in the 1950s.
- MomoXenosaga 4y agoEveryone declared NYC dead once. People should read some goddamn history books these things wax and wane.
- willnonya 4y agoThese things don't "wax and wane" they respond to the incentives created by those locations, whether politically cultural. NYC declined until they changed course. They've slowly been reverting and experiencing similar declines.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoThat doesn't mean that quality of life doesn't suffer during the waning periods. Someday it will make a comeback. In the meantime, there's lots of suffering to be had.
- csdvrx 4y agoNYC dared to tackle its crime problem and clean up. I don't think that'll ever be possible in California.
- hparadiz 4y agoCrime is out of control in every city in the country. I left Philadelphia for the same reason. That said there's always the suburbs so I don't understand why it's specifically a whole state problem.
- systemvoltage 4y agoRoman Empire never fails until it actually does. I want things to get better in California and be the best place on planet earth to live. The first step in doing that is actually admitting that things are getting worse and there is a dire need to change things. At some point your argument won’t hold anymore. The decline is real and the arguments made in the 90’s stood on a different truths than today. This defense hides the fact that people are still believing the falsehoods and instead of introspecting, they're not even believing the facts presented in the article. The first comment on top is an ad-hominem attack on the credibility of the Economist instead of its substance. We need to take a hard look at what went wrong. Imagine if we're a team trying to do a post-mortem of an outage in our company. We'd dig into what the real root cause is. Here, Californians like myself are fed up with decline and all you see is people getting into tribal "Us vs Them (Texans)" game. That's what I see on HN.
- barney54 4y agoBut the weather and natural beauty is a big thing! I have this though every time I visit. California.
- AnnikaL 4y agohttps://archive.ph/JjjMU https://archive.ph/JjjMU
- hintymad 4y agoI wonder where the money went. California is the 5th largest economy in the world ranked by GDP, while it has merely 40M people. It couldn't recoup too much property tax due to Prop 13, but it cuts its teeth into income tax, sales tax, and gas tax. Yet the government is crying for more spending. So, how was our money spent?
- not2b 4y agoIt has 39.5 million people. And the budget currently has a surplus and it looks like some of that money will be refunded to taxpayers.
- hintymad 4y agoThanks. Updated to 40M
- ccn0p 4y agowhether CA puts income limits on those refunds remains to be seen.
- dahdum 4y agoThe surplus is an illusion, California has over $1T in unfunded pension liabilities. $74k per taxpayer.
- danans 4y ago$1T is the debt if you assume a discount rate of 3%, which is lower than the rate of return on long term government bonds, and far lower than the rate of return on what the state pension programs actually invest in. A far more standard discount rate of 7% results in a debt of $310B. https://www.pensiontracker.org/ https://www.pensiontracker.org/
- inferiorhuman 4y agoWhere's the money go? Voters. California loves its populist bullshit. The majority of the California budget is already allocated via all sorts of enticing ballot box measures that are powered by unfunded mandates. There's comically little discretion involved. Per Prop 98 K-12 education is the single biggest chunk. That sounds great until you realize that on lean years you can't cut K-12 funding at all. https://ebudget.ca.gov/2022-23/pdf/BudgetSummary/SummaryCharts.pdf https://ebudget.ca.gov/2022-23/pdf/BudgetSummary/SummaryChar...
- briandear 4y agoCovid extremism was certainly a cause. I left California for Texas because of the almost hysterical reaction. (Arresting a surfer on an empty beach. Filling skateparks with sand. Keeping schools closed long after much of the red states had opened.) Prop 47 was another issue. Crime, especially in the Bay Area because much more significant. Then housing — not much needs to be said there. And taxes. And gas prices. For those attempting to start a business such as a restaurant, the permitting process is insane. Can take a year. In my suburban Texas county permits take about two weeks. And car registration. My 2017 Audi cost over $750 for the 2020 registration. In Texas? $74.50. I didn’t live in San Francisco (was in Mountain View,) but the school board there lost their ever-loving minds. Renaming George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others because of “wokeness.” Not to mention the anti-Asian initiatives to degrade admission standards to the selective schools. Then there’s the anti-lead propaganda being used to close Reid-Hillview airport so Santa Clara County can get ultra rich selling the land to developers while simultaneously protecting Coyote Valley as open space, despite it being literally nothing but farmland — instead of using that land for housing. Supervisor Cindy Chavez is one of the most corrupt politicians in the area with multiple conflicts of interests with area non-profits. I am sure California is better off without my tax dollars and my politics. I am certain not a single person was sad to see me leave. Fun fact, my household move to Texas from California cost about $18k for the moving company. If I were doing the same trip I’m reverse, it would have cost $5000. The exodus was real. Things I miss: Palo Alto Airport, the weather, flying my airplane to Half Moon Bay. Heading over to Mariposa-Yosemite. Hoping down to LA to eat at Carney’s. And despite Silicon Valley being a relatively unfriendly place, there are some really nice people mixed in with the Tesla bros and startup douches. Edit: grammar
- inferiorhuman 4y agoI love how Prop 47 has become the rallying cry of the alt right. Prop 47 raised the threshold for certain felony crimes to, what? $950? That's smack in the middle compared to other states. For the record, Texas set their threshold at $2,500[1] back in 2015 – note that the previous threshold was already nearly four times what California had theirs set to prior to Prop 47 ($400). Meanwhile SFPD busted a few of its cops for tossing drug evidence[2] instead of arresting the suspect, but somehow Prop 47 is the problem. > Then there’s the anti-lead propaganda I, for one, am kind of enjoying this "exodus". 1: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2017/04/the-effects-of-changing-felony-theft-thresholds https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri... 2: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SFPD-cops-allegedly-destroyed-evidence-17091890.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SFPD-cops-allegedly-d...
- wwweston 4y agoDid I miss what the old California Dream was? Seems like the word doesn't even appear in the article. Most of California's problems are Popular Place Problems™. Seeing it become marginally less popular as a result seems more like part of natural limiting mechanisms than it does a major sign of worry. But it does worry me that a lot of places seem to think of the issues as "California" problems rather than problems with underlying dynamics that could just as show up where they are, as soon as they become a Popular Place.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoCalifornia's high school graduation requirement are inferior to Alabama's due to California's popularity?
- danans 4y agoThat's a very cherry-picked statistic seemingly brought in to distract from the discussion. Many states that are both more and less "popular" than CA have lower high school graduation rates than CA. Places like Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, Louisiana, Maryland, Alaska. The GP was clearly talking about problems like housing unaffordability, traffic, displacement, water scarcity, etc. 1. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_226.60.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_226.60.a...
- ggm 4y agoThe drive west has had waves of california dreaming. There was the blue sky goldrush fantasy. There was the migrant worker, dustbowl fantasy. There was the Kerouac post-war freedom fantasy. There was the post Kerouac, Kesey/Leary drugs fantasy. There was the Gerry Brown Fantasy. South Park stopped at EV owners sniffing their own farts. I think the techbro fantasy and the return of arts from Portland to LA has driven another shift in the story. Snowbirds from Canada are another kind of California Dream.
- thghtihadanacct 4y agofantasy is the right word. It aint all milk and honey out here
- mensetmanusman 4y agohttps://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-age-changes-since-1950/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-age-changes-since-19... Dynamism goes down as the median age increases. This shouldn’t be surprising for anyone following California’s demographics.
- jeffbee 4y agoAs the "housing theory of everything" teaches us: it's the housing. If you want people you need habitats for them.
- mjfl 4y agoAs someone who moved from the Northeast to Los Angeles for work, LA is not really what it was advertised to me. Outside of certain special areas, it's a dump, and I don't want to settle here.
- maybelsyrup 4y ago> Outside of certain special areas, it's a dump There are several comments in this thread already with this general vibe. As a CA resident, I definitely don't disagree, but I travel a lot in the US and outside it, and have done so for most of my life (immigrated here fairly young), and I'm really confident when I say that, in terms of infrastructure and general urban/suburban aesthetics, the US has gone from "fairly bad for a developed country" to "complete shithole" pretty quickly in the last ~20 years. (My experience is mostly with larger urban areas, for context, so maybe rural USA doesn't feel as much like Mad Max.) Every time I come back to the US, as soon as I deplane into the (inevitable) 65 year-old airport with low popcorn ceilings and stained carpeting, I sense it more and more. If I'm coming back from another 1st-world country, it's like "this feels like Guatemala", and if I'm coming back from Guatemala, it's like "this feels like Guatemala". (No hate on Guatemala btw it's an incredible place with incredible people, but it's very poor (thanks in large part to US but that's another hot take for another thread).) This is an anonymous internet comment on an emotional issue so maybe I'm like 10% exaggerating here, but mostly not.
- usrn 4y agoWe've imported a ton of people from third world countries to the point that the demographics have substantially changed. I don't think we should be surprised that the country changed as well.
- dredmorbius 4y agoMuch of the worst degradation is (somewhat unsurprisingly) in locations with stagnant or declining population. Hardly where in-migration is highest. And areas with the highest levels of migration tend to be magnets strictly on the basis that they do have more vibrant economies. The fact that the US saw massive growth in the decades following WWII, and that much of that building stock and infrastructure were built quickly and cheaply, or are just simply old, also contributes. 40--60 year infrastructure, particularly where weather is a factor --- freeze-thaw cycles, salt, and moisture especially --- can beat the heck out of virtually anything surprisingly quickly. It's also news to me that a generalised opposition to government and community investment is an ideology especially acquired from immigrants, unless you're referring to, say, the Murdoch family.
- jscipione 4y agoDoes "demography" substitute for a particular race of people and does "old California Dream" mean another race of people that have been displaced?
- Arnt 4y agoNo, it's largely about age. The age composition of California is becoming more similar to the rest of the country.
- nineplay 4y agoThe Economist is such a strange magazine sometimes. It seems to think California is falling from some Golden Age without much but hand-wavy references and oddball stats. > "the state’s demography is now at odds with Californians’ sense of their home state as “a place where we can play in the sun” (to quote the Beach Boys)." > As a result, California has lost a component of its former diversity: the sense that it is a place where people from all over America come to make good. > Yet if the state is ethnically more diverse, it is less of a melting pot in a different way: it used to be a place where everyone came from somewhere else. What is up with these statements? They list demographic changes as though they are a crushing blow to California's sense of self. > Another sign is that half the states’ foreign-born immigrants are citizens, the highest share for 40 years. This is a problem? What a strange metrics to pull out. > Perhaps you have to be rich and educated to move to California. "California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;" "But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot" "If you ain't got the do re mi." -- Woody Guthrie, 1937 https://www.songfacts.com/facts/woody-guthrie/do-re-mi https://www.songfacts.com/facts/woody-guthrie/do-re-mi
- daniel-cussen 4y agoYeah I'd say it's similar to the 1930's California in Grapes of Wrath.
- jlbbellefeuille 4y agoNobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded.