Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco
I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality.<p>The usual retort to this is “what will you do without California’s economic engine?” And that’s a fair point—America without California will be less wealthy. But that will be fine; and in fact probably better. Think about it. People reminisce about the 1950s and 1960s as the good times. What did America look like back then? It looked a lot more like Iowa. Poorer than California on average, but economically flat with a low ceiling (few high income people) and a high floor (few really poor people). There are few upper middle class people (very little knowledge industry jobs) and consequently very little of the ecosystem that upper middle class people bring with them (housing, retail, restaurants, etc., that are unaffordable to normal people). Upper middle class people are what drive malaise among the rest of the population.<p>People in places like San Francisco, Portland, etc., complain about the tech industry people moving in. And the response of tech industry people is “hey, we’re not billionaire, we’re working stiffs like everyone else.” Jeff Bezos might have oodles of money, but it’s just on paper. He’s not buying enough houses to move the market prices. It’s Amazon engineers that are buying houses with their high salaries in sufficient numbers to drive up property prices. And as a result, people can’t afford to live and raise kids where they grew up. And that imposes devastating costs on middle class people. For middle class people for whom child care is a major expense, being able to drop the kids off at their grandparents regularly is a huge boon economically and socially. (Remember, the median American adult lives less than 18 miles from their mom.) Then comes all the other stuff. The corner burger joint is replaced by a fancy one that charges $18 for a cheeseburger. The diner where you can get a $1.00 coffee is replaced by a fancy coffee that charges $5.00 for a coffee. Conveniences and frivolities become far more expensive. The local gymnastics studio where you can send your kid twice a week to get her out of your hair doubles it’s prices. Etc. Jeff Bezos, by contrast, has no impact on any of that.<p>I think the natives complaining about the influx of high income professionals actually perceive the reality correctly. Most of them aren’t qualified for high paying jobs at Google and Facebook anyway. These industries moving in won’t help them in that regard. It will simply create a large contingent of people who can now outbid them on access to fixed resources, which will make their lives worse.