California does not have the highest poverty rate in the USA

Imagine you're a one of Apple's (very stable) geniuses. Would you rather hear someone say "My computer doesn't work, fix it" or "I can't use my computer because the screen is busted." Yes, high housing prices are a component of poverty in California, but if you make poverty the story, you're burying the lede. The real story is housing housing housing, and that the housing crisis is creating more poverty.

That's your interpretation of the article. I don't believe that's how the article was written.

Author acknowledge the high housing cost but states that the metric that was used only account for a few things and it ignore other metrics which can skew it towards a certain argument.

Author also stated that the other person lied about how large state employment for California is. Author actually normalize/standardize it per capital instead of a having stating this is a large number.

You and the article can argue whatever yall want but it's just an opinion until yall do factor analysis or some sort of algorithm to figure out what's the right combination of metric is.

This back and forth of complainers and defenders reminds me of old time raps --where someone came out with a rap and then someone would have to come back with an answer rap.

I bet if the state were controlled by different parties, Mother Jones and LA Times would have a different takes. This is politics at work.

As a Californian from the coast I feel your pain, but seriously compare this state to opioid country and we're doing great. Most of the people I knew from high school have had to leave because they can't afford it here now. But these are signs of a good economy and low poverty.

We are doing fine if you take out housing prices, and we are doing not great if you include them. Which is why everyone throughout the state is talking about the housing crisis. Unless you have some brilliant ideas like draining the SF Bay[0], housing is hard to do while simultaneously worrying about the environment.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan

My impression is that using statistics to say CA has the highest poverty rate is just a good use of numbers to get attention for a headline. I highly doubt if you carefully considered the philosophy of what it is to be poor and used that to come up with scientific methods to measure it, you wouldn't find CA at the bottom. If someone thinks it is, they probably don't have a very good view of the rest of the country. (and really, I don't think it's very helpful to rank states. economies, regions, and populations within a state and how they're doing is an actually useful metric, 'poorest state' is too far disconnected from solutions)

And if we're talking about solutions, the top point should be disabusing people of the thought that the world owes them the right to keep their standard of living while staying in the same place despite economic climate changes. All of my ancestors moved to America and around America rich and poor, were driven largely with economic motivations. I would think that most people that ended up in America (and especially California) ended up there in search of opportunity. Many of CA's economic problems can be largely solved by a population from the top to the bottom more willing to take advantage of the competition for talent, labor, and cost of living from around the country. The artificial imbalance of people and companies that just don't want to leave is causing the absurdly high prices of things near the coast.

Ronald Coase: "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."