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Comment by teachrdan | Hacker News Reader

Do you have data to back that up? Do we know that the number of Californians leaving is higher than before, and if so, by how much?

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California is losing a house seat, while Texas and Colorado are gaining one (or two for Texas). While the census doesn't account for the difference between growth rate and migration, it seems pretty suggestive to me.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/2020-census-d...

You know, you gain seats by gaining population. Just because one state is growing faster doesn't mean another is losing people. Those are hardly dependent nor even expected (California gained it's massive population despite an overall high growth rate of the rest of the nation).

We know for a fact that people are no longer moving to California in large numbers from other states. That's more than a little bit suggestive of the overall context, of what's happening. And it's a big change from what used to be normal for California in the past, as it used to pull large numbers of people to it from other states.

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.

declines take 100s of years. No one will really notice but it will just slowly continue to get worse but not at any kind of satisfying pace, like a big crash.

"Losing people" (total population dropping) isn't quite the same thing as "exodus" (large number of people leaving) though.

California grew 6% from 2010 to 2020 while the country grew 7%. Hardly a smoking gun.

California lost a seat in the Congress while Texas gain two seats. California exodus might be a myth but there is no inflow of people while Texas is gaining more people from other states.

It’s crazy to think that Texas and California started out having the same number of people as recent as 1940, and now California is 33% more populous. It isn’t weird that growth in Texas might start picking up considering how slowly it has grown compared to California over the last 80 years.

Anecdotal data is still data, just not conclusive data. But there is a Chinese saying "无风不起浪", which roughly translates to “If there are waves on the water, there must be wind somewhere".

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 that you do not collect yourself is subject manipulation (both deliberate and incidental) by the people who do collect it. There are over 300 million people in the US, you can collect anecdotal data for just about any narrative you want.

Anecdotal data you collect yourself is subject to your own biases, but is probably a decent reflection of the bubble you live in.

I wonder if the exodus is true in our personal or group bubble. Two theories:

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 are hearing a ton of these anecdotal stories very recently about Californians moving to other states, especially wealthy, higher income individuals.

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.

This is objectively true: people are leaving California for high cost of living, insane real estate prices, and dysfunctional state politics. California is not the epitome of the American dream of "heading west" to make it big that it once was. And tech workers increasingly have mobility. Just the other day there was a top story on HN about a small town in Idaho that has become unaffordable because of outflows to there and lots of anecdotes about similar things happening in other cities around the country. The great opportunity that California once was has dried up, just like the reservoirs.

> objectively true

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?'

That is nowhere near objective, it's like you didn't read the article. Your biases are pretty clearly showing here.

I do not have any data to present. I only have my personal observations and anecdotes from my peers. Which is why something seems off when this article claims the exodus is a myth when I see so many California license plates and when my realtor friend says a lot of Californians are buying up houses in the local market.

I don't claim to be a better researcher than the folks in the article but the conclusion doesn't seem to add up.

There are people leaving California, and California's population is huge. But the rate at which they are leaving is less than that of many other states, and the main migration is within the state. You are seeing a lot of Californians because there are a lot of Californians.

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.

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