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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

It's really weird the way people argue how disastrous regulations are when their are clear examples of them being fine.

- California bans non-competes and it is essentially the fastest growing economy in the western world. But if you read WSJ banning non-competes is a disaster.

- SOX is supposedly a disaster, but when SPACSs bypass that process they are almost universally terrible. Also, the stock market and the VC business have both done great under SOX.

I think we don't realize how good the existing US regulatory framework is. If we try to improve it we should have a strong status quo bias.

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> - California bans non-competes and it is essentially the fastest growing economy in the western world.

Source? From cursory Googling, it doesn't even seem to crack the top 10 US states, let alone Western world economies...

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/economy/gro...

You make a really good point, I should have cited a source. Let's compare California with the top state on that list.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187834/gdp-of-the-us-fed...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187861/gdp-of-the-us-fed...

What's kind of a joke about that is that between 2020-2021 California added an Idaho.

Also, to undermine my point, Texas seems to have grown at almost exactly the same rate (80% increase in 20 years): https://www.statista.com/statistics/188132/gdp-of-the-us-fed...

Compare this to an excellent first world economy, Germany. I think all Europe and Japan is worse. South Korea is probably much better.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2021...

So I think you could say California only grew at the pace of the fastest states in the US in the last twenty years (all with non-competes, which was my point) but the overall amount of growth was by far the most. The point is having no non-competes didn't seem to destroy it.

And here's the propaganda version -- I think being skeptical of this stuff is a good idea. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/10/24/icymi-california-poised-to...

I was being too flip and you were right to point this out.

Your link doesn't exactly mean what you think --- they're giving a combination of economic growth and population growth. When looking at just the GDP growth, your link suggests that they are the 6th fastest growing US state economy. As a sibling commentator noted, this is growth is on top already being the largest state economy. (Texas had the 2nd largest GDP percentage increase from 2020 to 2021. Texas grew 2% faster than California, for an economy only 2/3 the size. Raw data [which the usnews article cited] here https://www.bea.gov/itable/regional-gdp-and-personal-income )

Not too long ago there was news that CA is about to pass Germany to become the 4th largest economy in the world. (CA press release here: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/10/24/icymi-california-poised-to... original article by Bloomberg)

On your own link it's 6th in terms of GDP growth. The other 2 are growth of young population and net migration where California is much more behind.

Maybe not in percent but in added billions $ of gdp or gdp per capita. A large shell getting larger instead of a tiny one doubling.

Just a shot in the dark though.

lol what just happened here?

Parent: This specific regulation causes unwarranted problems.

You: Wrong, because there exist regulations that are good and wrongfully impugned. <top reply>

Me: ???

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