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Comment by danielvf | Hacker News Reader

From the original article and chart (not the current linked site):

> "California has a labor force of 19.3 million compared to the labor force in the UK of 33.8 million (World Bank data here). Amazingly, it required a labor force 75% larger (and 14.5 million more people) in the UK to produce the same economic output last year as California! ... Further, California as a separate country would have been the 5th largest economy in the world last year, ahead of the UK ($2.62 trillion), India ($2.61 trillion) and France ($2.58 trillion)."

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> Amazingly, it required a labor force 75% larger (and 14.5 million more people) in the UK to produce the same economic output

Look at it the other way, the UK can house & feed more people with the same economic output, therefore being more efficient at those tasks.

Does that mean the Central African Republic is the most efficient economy on the planet?

Does the Central African Republic have a comparable standard of living to the UK and California?

No, because the quality of life is not similar. I think the parent of your post implicitly used that quality of life and poverty rates between the two are (relatively) comparable.

How comparable, exactly? If QoL in California is better in proportion to the workforce disparity then the UK isn’t any more efficient. If it goes the other way then the UK is even more efficient. Assuming they’re the same doesn’t make any sense.

If they're more or less the same, then assuming they're the same makes perfect sense.

That depends on how close “more or less the same” actually is. Within 10%? Sure. Within an order of magnitude? That would swamp the other difference.

I have no idea which way it is, but spinning lower GDP per worker as more efficient doesn’t make any sense to me.

>spinning lower GDP per worker as more efficient doesn’t make any sense to me

Well, the GDP doesn't make any sense either. Busywork also increases the GDP.

The UK has 1.75x the number of people than California, but has 2.19x the number of homeless people (more than 250,000 as of 2016, compared to California having 114,000 as of 2017).

Homeless people don't die off seasonally due to weather in California.

Do you believe that exposure to weather is killing a statistically significant number of people in the UK?

Hard to say about the UK for sure without further research.

During college in Utah I was sad each winter to regularly read stories in the newspaper about homeless people found frozen to death in parks.

After President Jimmy Carter closed the mental institutions in the 70s, the mentally ill people were just let out of the asylums without any plan or further support from the state.

Since then, homelessness has grown into a ubiquitous and rampant problem throughout the United States.

Especially true in sunny California, and doubly so in San Francisco. SF seems to have become the Homeless Capital of the world. A sad and embarrassing state of affairs for a "leading" first world country.

To be clear, the amount homelessness in California is not due to lack of improvement efforts. The City of San Francisco alone pours a quarter of a billion dollars annually into services for the homeless. Despite such efforts, more than half of the homeless in the city remain unsheltered.

Not sure why you think Carter closed the mental institutions:

"1980 President Jimmy Carter signs the Mental Health Systems Act to improve on Kennedy’s dream [JFK wanted to create a network of community mental health centers where mentally ill people could live in the community while receiving care.].

1981 President Reagan repeals Carter’s legislation with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. This pushes the responsibility of mentally ill patients back to the states. The legislation creates block grants for the states, but federal spending on mental illness declines."

https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...

I'm on board with everything you said except about Jimmy Carter closing mental institutions; that's quite the opposite of what happened. It was his successor, Ronald Reagan, who was instrumental in closing many mental health services.

As far as California, specifically the bay area: it's a hell of a mess. Beyond people living on the streets, there is a growing group of people living in RVs. I took these pics near my office in Palo Alto a couple of weeks ago:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/tJKzrSZmaU8HW1NaA

RV's are essentially mobile homes with the driving unit built in, so I wouldn't really call that homeless.

Illegally parked, but not homeless

Right. I don't think of them as homeless per se. They're certainly in an unenviable position.

Also: at least in Mountain View and Palo Alto, these are not all necessarily illegally parked. They need to be moved every couple of days, but at the moment, the cities aren't pressing the issue.

Thanks for the correction @Diederich, it was before I was alive and you are absolutely right- blame Reagan.

Its for sure a motivator for not being homeless. How many homeless in greenland / laponia ?

Despite that, UK life expectancy (81.2 years) is higher than California (80.8 years). Not that the UK scores especially highly on this measure - plenty of countries do better.

Americans have an anomalously high death rate due to injury, notably automobile accidents, that significantly drives life expectancy down. It is an adverse consequence of driving far more miles on average than people in any other country. Most Americans know someone who died in an auto accident.

An American that drives relatively few miles over their life changes their life expectancy to be one of the highest in the world. It is a high impact lifestyle choice that I made a decision to adopt many years ago in part for this very reason.

I am always skeptical of comparing numbers of homeless people, as different countries have vastly different methods of measurement.

For instance, New Zealand has the highest number of homeless people per capita. But this is only because in New Zealand, you're basically counted as homeless if you don't have a rental contract or own a house. I was technically homeless for 18 months or so, despite having a roof over my head and being perfectly happy with my living situation, I certainly didn't consider myself homeless until I read an article telling me I was. I still didn't consider myself homeless after reading the article.

Unless we know how the numbers for the UK and California are calculated, there's no point in trying to compare the numbers. Where did you source your numbers from?

I did a bit of research, and while on the face value, the numbers are correct, they aren't really correct at all. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

The official number of homeless in the UK is 307,000 [1]. This includes "sleeping rough, or accommodated in temporary housing, bed and breakfast rooms, or hostels". There are only about 4,800 rough sleepers in the UK [2].

In California, there are 113,000 homeless people (2017), of which 88,000 are unsheltered, i.e. sleeping rough. [3, page 25]. HUD defines homeless differently to the UK Govt too, living in a motel or a hotel (if not paid for by the government) is not considered homeless [4]. So there's a whole category of people counted as homeless in the UK, but not the USA.

There are massively more rough sleepers in California than in the UK, even counting for the fact that the UK is much colder than CA.

Anyway, my rather long winded point is that it's difficult to compare numbers between countries, because countries have different ways of counting things.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/08/one-in-every...

[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[3] https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2017-AHAR-P...

[4] https://www.nhchc.org/faq/official-definition-homelessness/

Is this what they mean when they refer to child poverty in NZ? The near-100% child homeless rate?

Of course, child poverty itself is no joke..

"Work expands to fill the amount of time available to complete it." Apparently this applies to man-hours as well as calendar time.

That shows the power of immigration. I'm not even talking about immigration from outside the US, though that's significant too. California has such high GDP per capita because it draws well educated people from the rest of the US. If it was an independent country, it couldn't do that so easily.

The UK has drawn well educated people from the rest of the EU.

Yes, and it's the main reason our economy hasn't tanked. But there have traditionally been more barriers to movement from the EU, not least language, so the effect is somewhat less, and easy immigration from the EU hasn't been going on for nearly so long. And don't get me started on Brexit...

> I'm not even talking about immigration from outside the US...

Migration, or internal migration is probably a better term here.

It isn't just the migration either - it is the nature of what happens. The top cities/areas for several industries are here, and many secondary ones as well. Film production, software/web, lots of aerospace. It also helps that a fair bit basic needs are provided back to the state by itself (Central Valley farming).

No it doesn't. California is 8th in terms of GDP per capita within the U.S. If you look at the list of states that are within +/- 10% of California's GDP per capita, you've New York and Massachusetts (which are suffering from out-migration), and Colorado, Nebraska, and Minnesota (none of which are major targets of internal or external immigration).

While your data are no doubt correct, this doesn't stop it being true for California. Just because a state is now suffering from out-migration doesn't indicate it didn't become wealthy from migration in the past, nor does it indicate it is getting poorer now due to that out-migration. To know that, you'd have to measure the economic contribution of the people moving in and of the people leaving. It is possible for the GDP per capita to increase and simultaneously for the population to decrease slowly.

Would be interesting to know where the wealth comes from in Colorado, Nebraska and Minnesota. I don't know enough about them to comment.

Edit: some data here: https://www.ocregister.com/2018/01/31/california-migration-c...

"The top relocation motivation for 65 percent of households arriving by van said they came to California for jobs. Only 43 percent of those departing by moving van described the move was work-related.

The jobs rush means your new neighbors are likely wealthier than the people they replaced. United’s study showed 68 percent of arriving households make $100,000 or more annually; just 63 percent of those departing by moving van make above that threshold."

OP made the assertion, they've got the burden of providing data in support of it. I'm just explaining that the data he did offer doesn't support his conclusion.

Wealth in Colorado, Minnesota, etc., comes from the same place as anywhere else. The U.S. is a rich country with lots of productive industries. Tech is actually a pretty small portion of that (5-6% of GDP, 3% of employment). E.g. Target is based in Minnesota, and has double the revenues of Facebook.

Because I can't resist: Facebook has 6x better net margin; comparing the revenues of a global retailer to those of Facebook is a bit of an odd choice.

I think it just means CA has managed to outsource more labour than the UK. Think of all the workers in China making Apple phones, or all the Uber drivers in the world forking over a chunk of their business to people in CA. It would be interesting to see the results if we could compute a per capita GDP that was actually divided among all the workers that support a given region's economy, regardless of whether they live in that region.

I've always been curious to find out if there is a study of California's location relative to it's GDP.

How much of the GDP is based on coastline, major ports, access to imports from China/Southeast Asia that get distributed to the rest of the US, US based companies located there with manufacturing based in China and even Mexico.

Geographically, it seems like it's in an ideal location to hold business HQ's with access to less expensive labor for imported goods.

Is there a study like this out there?

You compare that to the UK that doesn't have any clearly accessible inexpensive labor force option and it makes you wonder.

California...and the West Coast of the U.S. is an interesting place in that it's geographically divided from the rest of the country by a couple of major mountain ranges and large deserts. In addition, something like almost 50% of the state is unusable federal land (national parks, military bases, etc.)

Despite this, it's one of the major agricultural producers in the world due to it's variety of climate zones and long growing seasons. I'm not sure of the current status, but agriculture used to be a larger industry for the state than tech and film combined.

One might think that its geographic location would be a problem, and cross-Pacific trade isn't as big as cross-Atlantic, but it's just so large and populated as a state, and it turns out that intra-Americas trade is far dominant to either oceanic competitor. Just selling its products and services to the U.S. alone brings it enormous economic activity. But it turns out that most of what it produces also has ample foreign markets as well (tech, film, food).

> cross-Pacific trade isn't as big as cross-Atlantic

Huh? Newport Beach is the busiest port in the world. Cross-Pacific trade dwarfs cross-Atlantic trade.

Where'd you find that? I googled for busiest ports and found LA is the 17th and Long Beach the 21st busiest in the world. And they are totally dwarfed by Shanghai and Singapore.

You mean Long Beach, right?

Yes. It was a poorly made claim. I should have looked it up. I meant LA/Long Beach which are actually two ports, side by side.

I also overstated the domain. I should have confined the claim to the country, not the world. And as others have pointed out, even at a national level, the claim is disputable.

>Huh? Newport Beach is the busiest port in the world. Cross-Pacific trade dwarfs cross-Atlantic trade.

Huh? Newport Beach? If you mean the Port of Los Angeles, which is next to Long Beach, but is actually in San Pedro, you're not even close. It's not even the busiest in America.

Measured by tonnage: Busiest port in the world is Ningbo-Zhoushan, China. Busiest American port is South Louisiana (#14 worldwide).[0]

Measured by containers: Busiest port in the world is Shanghai, China. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[1]

Measured by transshipments: Busiest port in the world is Singapore. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[2]

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

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...

[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_transshipment_...

I looked up the stats on public vs. private land in each state and was totally surprised to see that your 50% figure is correct (actually 52% on that chart I was looking at). That said, much of that land falls into national and state parks, monuments, recreational areas, forests, lakes and reservoirs, all of which make the state a more pleasant place to live and recreate in so I'm perfectly fine with that.

I feel much the same. A big chunk of Oregon is federally owned, and a non-trivial amount of that is the national forests directly east of Portland. The idea of that all being privately owned makes me shudder. I love being able to go out and enjoy the wilderness without having it chained off an inaccessible to people not rich enough to buy a chunk for themselves.

You should see Nevada - the federal government owns 85% of the land there.

It appears that agriculture accounts for about 2% of the "gross state product".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#Agricult...

Federal land percentages by state map: http://assets3.bigthink.com/system/tinymce_assets/944/origin... Amazing how much of the West is federal land. http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/291-federal-lands-in-the-us

Federal land by state table (numbers vary between years and by counting method - Utah federal lands have increased significantly since 2004): https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state#Fede...

California map: https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/printable/images/pdf/fed...

California is also the economic engine of a larger region, where UK is a whole country. If you compare per capita GDP of London it is probably higher than California. But the truth is my native state is an economic and cultural miracle. Yay.

California is just better at attracting investors.

It's all rather arbitrary. As with every other state, California's economy is tied to lots of workers outside its boarders. It isn't a country. It isn't surrounded by water. So it is harder to capture exactly how much activity happens within California in comparison to how much happens in an island nation like the UK.

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