This is a tricky article because I can tell it's using the term 'exodus' and 'myth' differently than I would. It's abundantly clear there is a lot of migration out of California. Just ask Texans, Coloradans, and Idahoans.
What this actually means is that people are watching too much TV.
American media isn't even particularly bad in this respect, it looks generally fair and reasonable compared to eg, the British media.
(in general, the legal requirement for TV to be impartial and cover both sides is a much bigger contributory factor).
There is a good reason why international comparison of crime tends to concentrate on murder. Crimes are neither reported not recorded the same way. Murder sorta-kinda comes closest in this regard: it is pretty hard to ignore violent deaths.
Things like endemic petty theft have the potential to make people move to another city, while their official record is pretty low.
Also it will show in other stats. People in other states tell me there is an exodus there from California or New England, and their reasoning is based on differences in truck rental prices going either direction, which international immigrants don't need but domestic migrants do.
Denver sucks now. Kindly find somewhere else to go, y'all have been sending my rent through the damned roof, and companies insist on paying pre-boom salaries.
I left Denver last summer after 7 years; honestly don’t miss it as much as I thought I would. Best of luck!
Or, you know, people generally migrate between states and Californians make up 13% of the population.
Currently residing in Texas for 2.5 years now, moved from California. Yes, I anecdotally meet "a lot" of fellow NY/CA residents moving here. I also anecdotally have noticed that Whole Foods sells lots of local texan brewery beers. Are Texan local breweries on the rise in popularity or is it just that my proximity to the situation is making me thinking thats the case? (Note - I'm middle aged and work in tech, like lots of the people moving to Austin from CA/NY)
The media's obsession with California, is IMHO, hilarious. I lived there for 3.5 years. The quality of life is incredible, but that is offset by the absurd cost (and thus the economics of your work situation). This experience has, IMO, been in decline. But this is exactly how market dynamics work in a union of states. The more people leave California the cheaper (and thus sustainable) it becomes.
This is an overall good thing for Americans, regardless of where you live. Market liquidity means higher optionality.
I love California so much that I buckled the popular media narrative and moved _from_ Texas _to_ California. Funnily enough, people talk about the California-to-Texas pipeline as if it's a new thing, but it's been an observed phenomenon since at least 2005, and it's a lot smaller than the media would have you think (usually net ~40k year leave CA for TX, with about 80k going to Texas and 40k coming from Texas). That is 0.1% migration, and seemingly negligible in either direction.
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2021/03/03/californians-mo...
Funnily enough, I'd say Houston (which as a Dallasite I grew up bashing on, in the way SF does LA) is probably the most similar Texas city to Los Angeles.
Which would be great if any other state had the weather and beauty of California. And California is fucking huge to boot. Not initially splitting it up into multiple states was one of the biggest mistakes in this nation’s history.
In my current neighborhood there have been 7 families that moved in during the last 12 months. One (us) from Utah, one from Texas, and the other 5 were from California.
Everyone everywhere in this country feels like it is getting inundated by Californians. Some more than others, sure.
I can see two or three cars with Cali plates right now from my stoop. More people will always be from there. I suspect this has been happening for a long time and just now for some reason people are noticing.
Not quite. It's nearly an eighth.
"Research Shows Percentage of Californians Planning To Leave State Unchanged since 2019"
Once SF Gate adds the subjective labels: Exodus and Myth, we get focused on the accuracy of the labels. The meanings of labels evolve, and that evolution is 'phased' through society. Hence labels will always mean different things to different people, different meanings lead to different reactions and then misunderstandings and in worst cases, conflict.
I intentionally try to filter out labels for that reason.
I don't claim to be a better researcher than the folks in the article but the conclusion doesn't seem to add up.
This isn't new: a couple of decades ago you saw a ton of people from California buying up property in the Portland area back when California's population was booming and Portland real estate was cheap.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/2020-census-d...
It's very obvious what's going on with California, why people no longer flock to it, and it's going to get a lot worse yet rather than better. If the flight from California isn't obvious enough yet, it will be. Given California's population growth has already stagnated, what comes next is going to be decline.
We are hearing a ton of these anecdotal stories very recently about Californians moving to other states, especially wealthy, higher income individuals. My gut feeling is that there is some material shift behind it and our systematically measured data could simply just be lagging at the moment, or they are measuring the wrong things.
Anecdotal data you collect yourself is subject to your own biases, but is probably a decent reflection of the bubble you live in.
Tech workers who can work remotely night be more likely to leave but make up a small part of the population of the entire state.
I also wonder if every cohort in SF/SV goes through a pattern where many people they worked with leave the area as they get older. So many people I've worked with there left over the last ~5 years as their lifes changed in things other than tech became important. In many cases this move was somewhat involuntary and driven by high cost of housing and other necessities like day care. So there always might be people who feel like everyone is leaving.
We know matches a political narrative (anti-liberal, anti-tax) and that the right, such as on Fox News, has long pushed it about CA. That would explain why you hear it so much.
EDIT: I'm trying to avoid discussing the politics of it on HN, but ignoring the narrative is like (as I said elsewhere) ignoring the Sun as we talk about Earth's orbit. It's impossible to discuss it seriously or honestly.
Based on what? Lots of people repeating something - we of the Internet age know better than our predecessors - isn't evidence of anything but 'viral' narrative, and raises no real question other than 'where did it come from?'
Among my friends and coworkers I’ve known dozens who left CA in the past 12 months .
Even just this morning as friend surprised me that he will be gone in a week, and I know many more who are actively looking to leave , particularly before fire season
That's the great myth with statistics. They are deliberately chosen to tell a story. By segmenting the data, you will get signal that matters to you.
If my friends and coworkers are all leaving, that is more meaningful to me and the decisions I'll make over the next year than if the majority of the entire population is staying.
It also has an impact economically on the State if specific segments of the work population are leaving.
As I've been chatting with some people at church* I was told that about 1/3 of the people that attend have moved to our little town in Idaho from Southern California in the past 2 years or so. That might not seem like much, but considering that this is small town in the middle of Idaho it seemed like a pretty big deal to me. It's especially interesting to see many people who have more traditional jobs, often revolving around construction or the cultivation of potatoes interacting with many of the white collar, MBA type Cali expats.
* Note: The church I attend is a world wide church and divides it's congregations based on geographic area, encouraging people to attend the service based on where they live. This point is made to forestall the correlation causation criticism, that would imply the church I attend is particularlye attractive to people that have recently moved in from SoCal,
EDIT: Just to clarify my wife and I did not move from Cali, we moved from Utah, because it was getting filled up with people from Cali, that resulted in prices for housing going up considerably.
72% moved elsewhere in the Bay area
~20% moved elsewhere in California
The next most popular destination was Washington state, the majority going to Seattle.
Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Only-one-U-S-city-...
"between 2019 and 2020, the number of households leaving skyrocketed by more than 77%, or roughly 35,000 households — from 45,263 in 2019 to 80,371 in 2020."
"But while many city residents left for the outer Bay Area counties, the region also lost population during the pandemic, according to the postal service data. In March to November of 2019, nearly 61,000 more change of address requests were made out of the nine counties than into them. In the same period in 2020, 111,350 more requests were made out of the nine counties than into them."
CA's major cities are losing pop and CA lost a House seat.
If we are talking about movements of people between California and Idaho, we can throw in Utah as well, then there is one church that has traditionally been very strong in those three states (and much of the west). I mean, what other church is so strong in SoCal that it owns a bunch of land (enough for a few sports fields) in LA Westwood near UCLA?
If Mormons are leaving SoCal for Idaho or Utah, that wouldn’t be very surprising at all.
The data must be wrong and all mothers must be as old as my mother.
That's the key point of the quote:
> There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it
FiveThirtyEight predicted a 28.6% chance of a Trump victory: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ This is a number far greater than zero - it is, for comparison, more likely than flipping two coins and them both coming up heads, or drawing a random card from a deck and having it be diamonds.
Opinion polling of the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election showed Boris Johnson favored to win: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_C...
Opinion polling on Brexit showed that it clearly could have gone either way, with a narrow margin between the two options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United...
I'm less familiar with Australian politics, but assuming you mean the 2013 election, opinion polls showed the Liberals were clearly in the lead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2013_A...
If people look at data that says "28.6% chance of winning" and they choose to read it as "0% chance of winning," that's not a problem with the way anyone's measuring anything, that's a problem with people trying to treat data as if it's an anecdote.
They definitely mean the 2019 election.
This is cherry-picking of the highest widely-known prediction by far, practically an outlier. And I don't think they do any actual polling, just analysis using others' polling data.
How these get turned to make precisely the opposite point (Not just by you. It happens all the time) never ceases to amaze me. Presumably the thought process is "I and the people I respect build beliefs based on data. I and the people I respect were wrong. Therefore the data was wrong". Unbelievable.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/19/voter...
> I’d also suggest that people who have an agenda to promote will often attempt to blur the line as much as possible between empirical measurements, and their own opinions about what they’re supposed to mean.
This ran rampant in all those cases (Trump, BoJo, Brexit), I agree.
Citation needed.
Given Jeff Bezos success in growing a business from scratch, this is clearly one of his secrets and why "Are right, A Lot" is an Amazon leadership principle. I'm always surprised that people are so easy to dismiss insights from successful people.
You have been presented with a thesis that the California exodus is a myth. You have responded with a complete non sequitur quote from a mediocre man about trusting the anecdote vs the data asking us to forget or ignore in order the fact that the idea espoused by the quotation is nonsense, that Bezos wasn't registering an opinion on this topic, you are, and that you have made no argument whatsoever.
It is untenable to launder your opinion through a rich dudes mouth and then accuse skeptics of casual dismissal of insights from successful people when people are actually and in fact not dismissing Bezos they are registering their opinion on your comment here today.
One thing we have to remember, savant level of greatness in one area can often indicate deficiencies in other areas.
If I were starting an online retailer 20 years ago, I would absolutely take Bezos’ advice. There are also countless other areas where I would seek advice from those with different areas of experience.
1. Anecdotes that you notice, by their nature, tend to come from reasonably sized groups of people.
2. "Data" as the term is normally meant in business and government does not. It may originally consist of many individual data points that represent something about large groups of people, but by the time it reaches a decision maker it has been filtered through normally just one or two people who have selected it, normalized it, and analyzed it in various ways.
In other words, "data" is often not being used with its dictionary definition of a raw CSV file but rather it means "analysis". And unfortunately the nature of data analysis is that not only is it easy to make genuine mistakes but it can also be very easily manipulated in all sorts of ways to present whatever the analyst wants to be true.
Academic research is an especially prevalent form of this problem because people don't hesitate to claim they've made a "data" based decision then cite an academic paper that presents a model with some absurd assumptions, or where the model outputs aren't visibly connected to the paper's conclusions at all, or which shows signs of P-hacking, or where the dataset is unusably small and so on and so forth.
Hence why I find myself agreeing with the other posters - if you find yourself strongly disagreeing with Jeff Bezos about something that seems to be within his domain, think twice.
In my experience it's the #1 source of errors that smart people make.
This is the kind of thing good CEOs and leaders do. There's some overlap with Andy Grove's observation that "only the paranoid survive."
Why do we even use research? Why don't we just run on anecdotes? There have long been anecdotes about witches and black cats, about prayers to the rain god, etc. I'm pretty sure Amazon relies on research and data.