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Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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