17 ms·

California Poised to Overtake Germany as World’s No. 4 Economy

77 points by wiihack 4y ago

metadat 4y ago
alternatively: https://archive.ph/rSnvn https://archive.ph/rSnvn
no_wizard 4y ago
Pull Quote for me: >Contrary to the prevailing perception of business dysfunction and exodus of people since the start of Covid-19 pandemic, the San Francisco Bay area accounts for 78% of the market capitalization of all publicly-traded companies in California, up from 70% five years ago. In essence, tech is fueling California more so than anything else, from what it seems. The growth is almost entirely due to tech industry wins. It'll be interesting to see what it is like 12-18 months from now, because the headwinds in tech are just starting to roll in full force before these statistics were finalized. California may see a bit of a down round next year. I will say though, despite a very lopsided and sometimes actively regressive tax structure and real estate problems in California, it does seem that this is still one of the best places in the world to grow a technology business. Non SV VCs never materialized with the strength the Silicon Valley VCs still command. I think Oregon and Washington are also seeing a pretty strong outgrowth from this, but at a much smaller scale. I feel like most of Texas tech scene wins have come from companies want to take advantage of the tax structure, and not from structural growth afforded to the region by lush VCs and risk taking entrepreneurs. Doesn't mean they don't exist (they really exist everywhere, see Mailchimp for instance) but it just isn't the same ballpark. It seems Texas has mostly only attracted well established companies looking to take advantage of structural tax advantages rather than growth opportunities. Of course, you may ask, why am I choosing to single out Texas? Because they made very public statements about coming after and luring in California businesses, especially tech businesses. Its clear that they didn't really put a big dent in this.
- 627467 4y ago
  Can't we say that trends are roughly similar to trends observed when comparing US and Europe in past... 20+ years? Economic growth happens despite degrading social indicators?
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    GDP growth and general well-being are not aligned. The more $50,000 emergency room bills we print and the more $2M toilets we construct, the better GDP looks.
    - NLPlatypus 4y ago
      But that money may have been spent elsewhere?
    - trollerator23 4y ago
      GDP growth is not, but GDP per capita is certainly aligned with general well-being. This is well documented.
  - LeanderK 4y ago
    > 20+ years? Economic growth happens despite degrading social indicators? Where is economic growth in europe happening despite degrading social indicators? Are there really countries with significantly degrading social indicators & economic success over the last 20 years in europe? All countries I know some social indicators of are actually improving. Maybe inequality....I think that was increasing
- modeless 4y ago
  The dysfunction is concentrated in the city of San Francisco. The wider Bay Area is not as bad. Also, attributing the whole market cap or revenue of a multinational corporation to its headquarters is not really the best way to measure things. Also, this is a lagging indicator. A lot of this growth is occurring in companies that were founded before the worst dysfunction occurred. It doesn't mean dysfunction is not here now and won't affect future growth.
  - simonebrunozzi 4y ago
    > The wider Bay Area is not as bad Lived in SF for 9 years (2012-2020), and visited many places in the whole bay area. I don't know what you're talking about, really. Bullet train? Slower than the slowest train in Italy. Homeless people? Try Mountain View, try San Jose. Only Marin County is a bit spared by it. Dirty? Expensive? Pretty much everywhere. Few exceptions, like downtown Palo Alto, around the Apple store. Really, you can't say it is "not that bad", unless you're forgetting there's the rest of the (civilized) world to compare it to.
  - 988747 4y ago
    Yes, one could argue, that the state of Delaware should be the world's 4th economy, since most of the Bay Area companies are registered there (alongside many others).
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    Which I point out as follows It'll be interesting to see what it is like 12-18 months from now, because the headwinds in tech are just starting to roll in full force before these statistics were finalized. California may see a bit of a down round next year. To your other point, regarding headquarters not being a good measure. I think the tech employee driven inflation of housing prices in the Bay area and surrounding metros (sometimes as far out as Sacramento. For non natives, that's ~2 hours away by drive, usually a more consistent 1 hr 30 minutes by train in my experience. Some corporate buses even go out to these farther out metros to pick up employees) is strong evidence that they're still hiring pretty locally, though with remote work in stronger force than ever, it is changing a bit, but those effects are yet to be determined in the common case, but it will upend some of this, 100% EDIT: I 100% agree about dysfunction in San Fransisco proper. Its a thing.
- outside1234 4y ago
  Texas is attracting companies that can't recruit in the Bay Area and/or whose execs don't want to pay income taxes.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    > and/or whose execs don't want to pay income taxes. So... Every single company?
    - slater 4y ago
      > and/or whose execs don't want to pay income taxes. So... Every single exec?
- luckylion 4y ago
  > It'll be interesting to see what it is like 12-18 months from now, because the headwinds in tech are just starting to roll in full force before these statistics were finalized. California may see a bit of a down round next year. As might Germany. High energy cost hurts a lot of German industries, so it could be about "who hurts more", and I'm not sure who wins if you're looking at bureaucracy being dysfunctional.
- kodah 4y ago
  Texas wants tech to replace some of its dependence on agriculture and oil. Comparing the two scenes seems wrong. Early on Silicon Valley siphoned talent out of Silicon Hill and adjacent businesses. It's going to take them a while to siphon that talent back to levels acceptable enough to create a growth tech economy. That means VCs, programmers, entrepreneurs, marketers, etc all have to make their way to the same-ish place in Texas. To say that businesses only go there for lax tax structure I think ignores why they left CA in the first place, which is they can't pay people enough to live there. I feel like at some point we'll have to force the spread of tech businesses across the United States. You can already see the effect of not doing so; SF is utterly unaffordable even for techies. The standard and cost of living are obtusely different from the rest of the country. I wager there's a lot of baggage that will come with this given that economics have a tendency of not observing state borders.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Even Texas, as bad as it is here as a citizen, has diversified it's economy past just oil and gas in the past 30 years or so.
hbarka 4y ago
- outside1234 4y ago
  But by your own link (PPIC) you can see that over decades crime in California continues to drop and is also near 30 year low levels.
Proven 4y ago
1024core 4y ago
As a Californian, I wish we'd overtake Germany in welfare indicators too: free college, great schools, good healthcare, etc.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  It surely would balance the overly priced items for nearly everything.
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  CA prefers to lead on insane housing prices, inequality and number of billionaires. They have played a pretty good role in environmental protections though. Not sure how I should think about homelessness in CA. I think the problem is that the climate attracts homeless people.
- cjensen 4y ago
  Free college sounds good until you realize that only 30% of German students get to go. In California, it's 60%. Thanks to the community college system in the US, students who do poorly in high school get a chance to prove they can make it instead of having only one shot at admission.
  - nosianu 4y ago
    > that only 30% of German students get to go. In California, it's 60 I have no idea what it is that you are comparing or where you pulled those numbers from. The systems are not the same and we have a lot more than "universities" for higher education, such as Fachhochschulen and Hochschulen. Overall, statistics says the number is 55% for the share of youth starting higher education in Germany: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/72005/umfrage/entwicklung-der-studienanfaengerquote/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/72005/umfrage... We also have what "Facharbeiter" for most non-higher education professions, which take 2-3.5 years. https://www.bmbf.de/bmbf/en/education/the-german-vocational-training-system/the-german-vocational-training-system_node.html https://www.bmbf.de/bmbf/en/education/the-german-vocational-... There is some discussion that there are now too many in the higher education track and too few in the vocational training track. We have too few "Facharbeiter" and "Meister" for a lot of important professions for the practical work. Personally, having done both tracks - in 1992 I obtained what would now probably be called "mechatronics engineer" after three years of training in a school and a huge chemical fiber plant for the practical on.the-job parts. Afterwards I studied CS and half of business administration. I think almost two thirds of youth every year going to higher education is way too much. Again, we have this vocational training, if there was nothing and Bachelor degrees count both as higher education and are used in place of where Germany uses our vocational training system - again, 2 to 3.5 years! - than it makes sense to get at least a Bachelor. But here in Germany I think we actually could use shifting some of those 55% into the other track. If you get such a vocational training degree, e.g. "Facharbeiter", you are already pretty well educated and qualified. If you add a "Meister" on top of that after getting some work experience you are on a path to really good earnings and don't have to hide at all from comparisons with top engineering degree holders. Those people would not show up at all in your comparison, because you don't have that system.
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
Isn’t that slightly helped by the USD being worth 20% more than the EUR than it was 12 months ago?
- cjensen 4y ago
  Yep, that's pretty much the entire reason. This article is much like the "rich get vastly richer this year" stories that come out when the stock market rises. For some reason the opposite stories do not get written when the stock market craters because that's not "fun." Expect "California falls to 5th place in the World's economy" articles if the exchange rate trend reverses.
  - trollerator23 4y ago
    Though looking at that GDP plot I am more curious about "what the hell happened to Germany?"
  - em500 4y ago
    The opposite stories do get written. e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-19/mark-zuckerberg-s-net-worth-is-down-71-billion-putting-focus-on-meta-s-woes https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-19/mark-zuck... I do agree that it's a very lazy form of news generation. Most of the (publicly) richest people tend to hold most of their wealth in stocks, which have always had volatile prices. So "the rich got richer/poorer" is largely synonymous with stock prices went up/down. Exchange rates tend to be a bit less volatile, but they do fluctuate quite a bit, so that accounts for quite a bit of the changing fortunes of California vs Germany. Still, it's quite remarkable (if true) that California has similar nominal production/income as Germany which has twice the population, implying that the people are on average twice as productive.
newaccount2021 4y ago
jp57 4y ago
Since California is not a sovereign state, this whole line of reasoning seems disingenuous. It's really an arbitrary boundary when we have free interstate commerce, and a highly interdependent economy. Where would California's economy be without the water they get from the other western states? Here are some other arbitrary subsets of the USA that would be interesting viewed as separate economies. - The original thirteen states. - The Amtrak electrified rail corridor from DC to Boston - The Mississippi watershed - The great lakes watershed (include the relevant parts of Canada, why not?)
- modeless 4y ago
  Northern California gets its water from within the state. Both for the cities and the agriculture.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    I can't think of any water system in California that imports significant amounts of water. I guess people are trying to count Colorado River water as imported? Perhaps they are unaware that river passes through California.
    - njarboe 4y ago
      Unless you count the Colorado River itself as a water system. :) I would guess that almost none of the water that California gets from the Colorado falls in California. Coloradans sure feel that the down river states don't have the natural right to water that falls on their land.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        Sure, the headwaters of this system are indisputably outside California. Still the Colorado aqueduct has a capacity of just 1.2MAF, which is less than 2% of the state water consumption. The idea that California depends largely on imported water makes little sense.
      - frumper 4y ago
salimmadjd 4y ago
The cynical me thinks this is also a pre-election (“wish selection”) PR to help promote the case for Gavin Newsom as president. You can imagine a talking point like “under my leadership, California overtook Germany as the 4th economy in the world…” The reality is Newsom had almost zero impact on it, his leadership should be judge by the growing homelessness issue we’ve seen in SF and rest of California and not take credit for tech economy. Yes, solving the homeless problem is a huge and complex challenge, but the country now needs leadership that is able to solve the big challenging problem. We’ve lost our ability to fix hard problems and we need to do that if we want to have a chance in a more competitive world.
- trollerator23 4y ago
  Exactly.
trollerator23 4y ago
Eh. WaPo pushing Gary Newson for 2024...
nonameiguess 4y ago
It's interesting to see this framed, both here and in the comments, as if it's some transitory phenomenon and California may be expected to soon decline afterward. I'm reasonably sure that isn't true. I haven't lived in California in quite a while, but grew up there in the 80s and 90s and I at least think I remember them telling us in school back then that California was the world's 4th largest economy back then. It seems that it regressed a lot after 2008 because it was hit so much harder than most of the world by the housing market collapse, and it is now mostly recovered from that. Back then, it was largely on the back of tourism, farming, and entertainment, too. Tech is a nice boon, but hardly necessary. California is not and has never been a single-industry economy, which is part of the reason it is so robust, and part of the reason it has recovered from the housing collapse better than most other places hit hard by it. Florida is another case there, with, at least for the US, much different tax policies and cultural traits, but also a very well diversified economy. It goes to show how little some of the things politicians and voters are always making a fuss about actually matter.
culi 4y ago
A lot of people don't realize that California's biggest export is actually airplanes and airplane parts. Whenever there's a war California's economy rapidly grows

77 points by wiihack 4y ago

alternatively: https://archive.ph/rSnvn https://archive.ph/rSnvn

Pull Quote for me: >Contrary to the prevailing perception of business dysfunction and exodus of people since the start of Covid-19 pandemic, the San Francisco Bay area accounts for 78% of the market capitalization of all publicly-traded companies in California, up from 70% five years ago. In essence, tech is fueling California more so than anything else, from what it seems. The growth is almost entirely due to tech industry wins. It'll be interesting to see what it is like 12-18 months from now, because the headwinds in tech are just starting to roll in full force before these statistics were finalized. California may see a bit of a down round next year. I will say though, despite a very lopsided and sometimes actively regressive tax structure and real estate problems in California, it does seem that this is still one of the best places in the world to grow a technology business. Non SV VCs never materialized with the strength the Silicon Valley VCs still command. I think Oregon and Washington are also seeing a pretty strong outgrowth from this, but at a much smaller scale. I feel like most of Texas tech scene wins have come from companies want to take advantage of the tax structure, and not from structural growth afforded to the region by lush VCs and risk taking entrepreneurs. Doesn't mean they don't exist (they really exist everywhere, see Mailchimp for instance) but it just isn't the same ballpark. It seems Texas has mostly only attracted well established companies looking to take advantage of structural tax advantages rather than growth opportunities. Of course, you may ask, why am I choosing to single out Texas? Because they made very public statements about coming after and luring in California businesses, especially tech businesses. Its clear that they didn't really put a big dent in this.

627467 4y ago
Can't we say that trends are roughly similar to trends observed when comparing US and Europe in past... 20+ years? Economic growth happens despite degrading social indicators?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  GDP growth and general well-being are not aligned. The more $50,000 emergency room bills we print and the more $2M toilets we construct, the better GDP looks.
  - NLPlatypus 4y ago
    But that money may have been spent elsewhere?
  - trollerator23 4y ago
    GDP growth is not, but GDP per capita is certainly aligned with general well-being. This is well documented.
- LeanderK 4y ago
  > 20+ years? Economic growth happens despite degrading social indicators? Where is economic growth in europe happening despite degrading social indicators? Are there really countries with significantly degrading social indicators & economic success over the last 20 years in europe? All countries I know some social indicators of are actually improving. Maybe inequality....I think that was increasing
modeless 4y ago
The dysfunction is concentrated in the city of San Francisco. The wider Bay Area is not as bad. Also, attributing the whole market cap or revenue of a multinational corporation to its headquarters is not really the best way to measure things. Also, this is a lagging indicator. A lot of this growth is occurring in companies that were founded before the worst dysfunction occurred. It doesn't mean dysfunction is not here now and won't affect future growth.
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  > The wider Bay Area is not as bad Lived in SF for 9 years (2012-2020), and visited many places in the whole bay area. I don't know what you're talking about, really. Bullet train? Slower than the slowest train in Italy. Homeless people? Try Mountain View, try San Jose. Only Marin County is a bit spared by it. Dirty? Expensive? Pretty much everywhere. Few exceptions, like downtown Palo Alto, around the Apple store. Really, you can't say it is "not that bad", unless you're forgetting there's the rest of the (civilized) world to compare it to.
- 988747 4y ago
  Yes, one could argue, that the state of Delaware should be the world's 4th economy, since most of the Bay Area companies are registered there (alongside many others).
- no_wizard 4y ago
  Which I point out as follows It'll be interesting to see what it is like 12-18 months from now, because the headwinds in tech are just starting to roll in full force before these statistics were finalized. California may see a bit of a down round next year. To your other point, regarding headquarters not being a good measure. I think the tech employee driven inflation of housing prices in the Bay area and surrounding metros (sometimes as far out as Sacramento. For non natives, that's ~2 hours away by drive, usually a more consistent 1 hr 30 minutes by train in my experience. Some corporate buses even go out to these farther out metros to pick up employees) is strong evidence that they're still hiring pretty locally, though with remote work in stronger force than ever, it is changing a bit, but those effects are yet to be determined in the common case, but it will upend some of this, 100% EDIT: I 100% agree about dysfunction in San Fransisco proper. Its a thing.
outside1234 4y ago
Texas is attracting companies that can't recruit in the Bay Area and/or whose execs don't want to pay income taxes.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  > and/or whose execs don't want to pay income taxes. So... Every single company?
  - slater 4y ago
    > and/or whose execs don't want to pay income taxes. So... Every single exec?
luckylion 4y ago
> It'll be interesting to see what it is like 12-18 months from now, because the headwinds in tech are just starting to roll in full force before these statistics were finalized. California may see a bit of a down round next year. As might Germany. High energy cost hurts a lot of German industries, so it could be about "who hurts more", and I'm not sure who wins if you're looking at bureaucracy being dysfunctional.
kodah 4y ago
Texas wants tech to replace some of its dependence on agriculture and oil. Comparing the two scenes seems wrong. Early on Silicon Valley siphoned talent out of Silicon Hill and adjacent businesses. It's going to take them a while to siphon that talent back to levels acceptable enough to create a growth tech economy. That means VCs, programmers, entrepreneurs, marketers, etc all have to make their way to the same-ish place in Texas. To say that businesses only go there for lax tax structure I think ignores why they left CA in the first place, which is they can't pay people enough to live there. I feel like at some point we'll have to force the spread of tech businesses across the United States. You can already see the effect of not doing so; SF is utterly unaffordable even for techies. The standard and cost of living are obtusely different from the rest of the country. I wager there's a lot of baggage that will come with this given that economics have a tendency of not observing state borders.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Even Texas, as bad as it is here as a citizen, has diversified it's economy past just oil and gas in the past 30 years or so.

hbarka 4y ago

outside1234 4y ago
But by your own link (PPIC) you can see that over decades crime in California continues to drop and is also near 30 year low levels.

Proven 4y ago

1024core 4y ago

As a Californian, I wish we'd overtake Germany in welfare indicators too: free college, great schools, good healthcare, etc.

nashashmi 4y ago
It surely would balance the overly priced items for nearly everything.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
CA prefers to lead on insane housing prices, inequality and number of billionaires. They have played a pretty good role in environmental protections though. Not sure how I should think about homelessness in CA. I think the problem is that the climate attracts homeless people.
cjensen 4y ago
Free college sounds good until you realize that only 30% of German students get to go. In California, it's 60%. Thanks to the community college system in the US, students who do poorly in high school get a chance to prove they can make it instead of having only one shot at admission.
- nosianu 4y ago
  > that only 30% of German students get to go. In California, it's 60 I have no idea what it is that you are comparing or where you pulled those numbers from. The systems are not the same and we have a lot more than "universities" for higher education, such as Fachhochschulen and Hochschulen. Overall, statistics says the number is 55% for the share of youth starting higher education in Germany: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/72005/umfrage/entwicklung-der-studienanfaengerquote/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/72005/umfrage... We also have what "Facharbeiter" for most non-higher education professions, which take 2-3.5 years. https://www.bmbf.de/bmbf/en/education/the-german-vocational-training-system/the-german-vocational-training-system_node.html https://www.bmbf.de/bmbf/en/education/the-german-vocational-... There is some discussion that there are now too many in the higher education track and too few in the vocational training track. We have too few "Facharbeiter" and "Meister" for a lot of important professions for the practical work. Personally, having done both tracks - in 1992 I obtained what would now probably be called "mechatronics engineer" after three years of training in a school and a huge chemical fiber plant for the practical on.the-job parts. Afterwards I studied CS and half of business administration. I think almost two thirds of youth every year going to higher education is way too much. Again, we have this vocational training, if there was nothing and Bachelor degrees count both as higher education and are used in place of where Germany uses our vocational training system - again, 2 to 3.5 years! - than it makes sense to get at least a Bachelor. But here in Germany I think we actually could use shifting some of those 55% into the other track. If you get such a vocational training degree, e.g. "Facharbeiter", you are already pretty well educated and qualified. If you add a "Meister" on top of that after getting some work experience you are on a path to really good earnings and don't have to hide at all from comparisons with top engineering degree holders. Those people would not show up at all in your comparison, because you don't have that system.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

Isn’t that slightly helped by the USD being worth 20% more than the EUR than it was 12 months ago?

cjensen 4y ago
Yep, that's pretty much the entire reason. This article is much like the "rich get vastly richer this year" stories that come out when the stock market rises. For some reason the opposite stories do not get written when the stock market craters because that's not "fun." Expect "California falls to 5th place in the World's economy" articles if the exchange rate trend reverses.
- trollerator23 4y ago
  Though looking at that GDP plot I am more curious about "what the hell happened to Germany?"
- em500 4y ago
  The opposite stories do get written. e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-19/mark-zuckerberg-s-net-worth-is-down-71-billion-putting-focus-on-meta-s-woes https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-19/mark-zuck... I do agree that it's a very lazy form of news generation. Most of the (publicly) richest people tend to hold most of their wealth in stocks, which have always had volatile prices. So "the rich got richer/poorer" is largely synonymous with stock prices went up/down. Exchange rates tend to be a bit less volatile, but they do fluctuate quite a bit, so that accounts for quite a bit of the changing fortunes of California vs Germany. Still, it's quite remarkable (if true) that California has similar nominal production/income as Germany which has twice the population, implying that the people are on average twice as productive.

newaccount2021 4y ago

jp57 4y ago

Since California is not a sovereign state, this whole line of reasoning seems disingenuous. It's really an arbitrary boundary when we have free interstate commerce, and a highly interdependent economy. Where would California's economy be without the water they get from the other western states? Here are some other arbitrary subsets of the USA that would be interesting viewed as separate economies. - The original thirteen states. - The Amtrak electrified rail corridor from DC to Boston - The Mississippi watershed - The great lakes watershed (include the relevant parts of Canada, why not?)

modeless 4y ago
Northern California gets its water from within the state. Both for the cities and the agriculture.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  I can't think of any water system in California that imports significant amounts of water. I guess people are trying to count Colorado River water as imported? Perhaps they are unaware that river passes through California.
  - njarboe 4y ago
    Unless you count the Colorado River itself as a water system. :) I would guess that almost none of the water that California gets from the Colorado falls in California. Coloradans sure feel that the down river states don't have the natural right to water that falls on their land.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      Sure, the headwaters of this system are indisputably outside California. Still the Colorado aqueduct has a capacity of just 1.2MAF, which is less than 2% of the state water consumption. The idea that California depends largely on imported water makes little sense.
    - frumper 4y ago

salimmadjd 4y ago

The cynical me thinks this is also a pre-election (“wish selection”) PR to help promote the case for Gavin Newsom as president. You can imagine a talking point like “under my leadership, California overtook Germany as the 4th economy in the world…” The reality is Newsom had almost zero impact on it, his leadership should be judge by the growing homelessness issue we’ve seen in SF and rest of California and not take credit for tech economy. Yes, solving the homeless problem is a huge and complex challenge, but the country now needs leadership that is able to solve the big challenging problem. We’ve lost our ability to fix hard problems and we need to do that if we want to have a chance in a more competitive world.

trollerator23 4y ago
Exactly.

trollerator23 4y ago

Eh. WaPo pushing Gary Newson for 2024...

nonameiguess 4y ago

It's interesting to see this framed, both here and in the comments, as if it's some transitory phenomenon and California may be expected to soon decline afterward. I'm reasonably sure that isn't true. I haven't lived in California in quite a while, but grew up there in the 80s and 90s and I at least think I remember them telling us in school back then that California was the world's 4th largest economy back then. It seems that it regressed a lot after 2008 because it was hit so much harder than most of the world by the housing market collapse, and it is now mostly recovered from that. Back then, it was largely on the back of tourism, farming, and entertainment, too. Tech is a nice boon, but hardly necessary. California is not and has never been a single-industry economy, which is part of the reason it is so robust, and part of the reason it has recovered from the housing collapse better than most other places hit hard by it. Florida is another case there, with, at least for the US, much different tax policies and cultural traits, but also a very well diversified economy. It goes to show how little some of the things politicians and voters are always making a fuss about actually matter.

culi 4y ago

A lot of people don't realize that California's biggest export is actually airplanes and airplane parts. Whenever there's a war California's economy rapidly grows