Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think that’a entirely fair. California is the product of good governance during the 1950s-1980s. There is public infrastructure, like good schools and universities, that needs to be laid to attract industry in the first place. California probably wouldn’t the what it is without the UC system, for example. Of course that was a very different California.

View on HN

In the last 30-40 years the cost to attend UC has gone up significantly (when I attended in the 90s tuition went down to $3,600/yr, it’s 5X that now), but the top schools are still world renown and the next tier have arguably moved up (UCSD and UCSB in particular).

I believe the greatest risk to California’s continued prosperity is the lack of affordable housing (which I would associate partly with Prop 13, but also just general NIMBYism). There have been a lot of efforts in the past few years to move towards higher density but I think we’ll need to wait until the next administration to see if this pro-housing approach is going to stick.

The period you mentioned is one of the most prosperous periods in history. It is easy to look good with everything in your favor.

Then why didn’t other states also do as well with everything in their favor?

Coastal regions are always more prosperous.

Like FLA and GA? California has higher taxes, california also has internationally ranked economies at the city level.

Of course things could be better, and like a previous commenter mentioned, there are missing investments in housing, transportation and more. That is however, because of the continuous specter of the right winning state offices and the "left" party basically being centerist.

FLA/GA are not major ports. They also do not have the farm land. Prosperity is not entirely location dependent, but it is one of the largest factors. CA has the climate (at least during that period) and natural resources very few places in the world do.

FLA/GA are absolutely major ports. Savannah is the fourth busiest port in the US, right behind combined New Jersey/New York.

People will say anything to avoid admitting that a higher tax, slightly center right state is doing well because of those policies and politics

Cognitive dissonance, just like the fact that all of the red states have way higher gun deaths per capita than any blue state yet they'll scream about Chicago without looking at the actual numbers

> Cognitive dissonance, just like the fact that all of the red states have way higher gun deaths per capita than any blue state yet they'll scream about Chicago without looking at the actual numbers

That's not cognitive dissonance, just different definitions. Red staters focus on total homicides. Age-adjusted homicide rates don't bear any clear pattern with red states versus blue states: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality.... https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/gun-ownersh...

Some of the states with the highest levels of gun ownership, like Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Minnesota, and Maine, have the lowest levels of homicides. Rhode Island has far fewer guns than Maine and New Hampshire, but all three have similar homicide rates.

Focusing on homicides where guns weren't involved in a conversation about guns is disingenuous and distracts from the issue at hand

FL and GA have grown phenomenally in the past decades. FL had 6.7M in 1970 [0] and 21.8M in 2020 [1].

It’s not as big as California, but has had substantial growth.

Georgia is similar.

[0] https://fcit.usf.edu/florida/docs/c/census/1970.htm [1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/FL

Georgia faster than the country as a whole during that period. Georgia's per capita income grew from 70% as much as the national average in 1945 to 94% in 2000: https://cslf.gsu.edu/files/2014/06/historical_perspective_of...

It's not entirely fair, but mostly

It’s complete bullshit and we can safely dismiss out of hand.

You should try living in California sometime so you'll see first hand

The fact that you called it Cali is pretty good evidence that you don’t live here

Lol, and now you edited it out. Case in point.

Living in California for four decades I have definitely heard people living here call it Cali. California is large and diverse, not everyone speaks like you do.

Don’t forget about massive defense spending, and middle class relocations to California.

What middle class is moving to California?

This was a really big thing in the 1950s and 60s.

California was hit a lot harder than most places in the 90s and 2000s with base closures.

Good schools? CA is one of the bottom in terms of education despite the 5th largest economy in the world. It's abhorrent.

California schools system is not good.

UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Los Angeles are some of the best engineering schools on the planet.

They are talking about non-higher ed when referring to "schools".

My experience with elementary school in California vs. Florida as a kid had such a disparity in quality in favor of California that I was able to notice it even at that young of an age. I came to figure out why much later in life, but I'll never forget that feeling like I'd taken a huge step back.

Maybe as a kid. But Florida kicks California's ass in K12 education these days. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?chor...

*According to Californians

It’s not an exclusive list; a lot of states have good tech universities. But it’s a pretty objective evaluation. Ask a tech employer anywhere.

According to most charts, numerous Universities in California are generally high ranking (the UC system, USC, Pepperdine, Stanford among them) but within numerous specialties it's indisputable: UCSD for biotech, UC Davis for Ag-tech/veterinary science, Berkeley/Stanford for CS, Boalt/Hastings/King for Law, etc. The specialization matters here significantly.

The US weirdly in general has a lot of high ranking universities, but its elementary and secondary schools are very very uneven, at any level.

They used to be good.

California has plenty of amazing public schools. But California is also highly segregated by both income and ethnicity. Fremont High School, for example, rivals some of the most expensive private schools nationally in terms of achievement, but it's a majority Asian school, especially South Asian, many of whom are middle- and upper middle-class (notwithstanding that by Bay Area standards the Fremont area is considered "working" class. You can find schools like Fremont all over California, but especially in the Bay Area, coastal Central California, and many places in Southern California.

OTOH, just a few miles from some of the best public schools in the country you can also find some of the worst. While California is segregated, most Californians nonetheless live in relative close proximity to people living in vastly different circumstances, so disparities are very evident.

+1. Georgia has homes selling for 500k in the Walton School district. It's ranked higher than Palo Alto's High Schools.

Let that sink in.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/georgia/d...

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/californi...

I went to Walton; it's a pretty shit school. They keep their stats up by pressuring anyone falling behind to drop out.

Some of the best public elementary, middle/junior, and high schools in the country are in California. Some of the worst are as well. California as a whole has a pretty good public school system. There are certainly issues. But many of them are really just debatable trade offs. For example, the whole San Francisco ed board recall. The main issue (aside from the renaming, which really was a side show to the main event) was the proposal to eliminate merit based entry to the premier high schools. The scientific data is pretty clear that if you want to benefit the most, you should not track students based on ability (i.e., put the "gifted and talented" into special advanced programs) but rather spend your limited resources on bringing the bottom half up. However, this is "unfair" to those who could benefit from development of their above average intellectual talents. In any way you proceed, there will be winners and losers. If you have an opinion on this: vote!

The rankings beg to disagree - https://www.niche.com/k12/search/best-public-high-schools/. Even the best schools in California are not as good as the other state's top schools. It doesn't help that 18%!!! of students in California's public education system are ESL. That's not due to Visa & green-card immigrants.

Texas and Florida do a much better job educating their minority and ESL kids going by NAEP scores.

> Some of the best public elementary, middle/junior, and high schools in the country are in California. Some of the worst are as well. ... > but rather spend your limited resources on bringing the bottom half up.

Ok, so right here is the issue. It's like saying that US has no poverty issue, because some of the richest people live here. You yourself mentioned, that it is important to improve the bottom percentiles. And the bottom percentiles in California are not good. Some of the exceptional schools in CA are private, some of them are public, but most likely located in expensive areas. You gonna have to pay for a good school either directly or via insane home prices. Yes, you can find decent schools in less-crowded-but-not-very-rural areas with more reasonable cost of living, sort of a sweet spot. And the majority of those schools aren't gonna be exceptional, the will be fine, just fine. Not better than any other state. But the lowest percentile in the worst area is still gonna drag the whole chart down. Everyone I know in CA who cares about school for their kids either lives in a pricy area or pays for a private school.

My main issue with the BoE was competence. There was a lack of competence across the board, but If I had to give a more specific reason to recall them, it was their incompetence with respect to re-opening schools. Their incompetence around the re-naming showed how bad they were.

As for Lowell, I think that was a big issue for many, but not amongst the 100+ parents that I’ve spoken to on the issue.

In no way, shape or form does California have a "pretty good public school system".

https://wallethub.com/edu/e/states-with-the-best-schools/533...

Ranked 42nd overall, 36th in quality and 51st, ie last in safety.

What the hell do you mean not track students based on ability? How else could you track them? It's not unfair really. If you let the smart fall to the level of the average, you end up with board and angry smart kids. They will not pull up the middle, they'll check out. The end results will be outsourcing. Based on the skilled worker shortage in Cali, I'd say bringing up the bottom isn't doing much for the top.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com