California Should Be The Economic Model For America | Hacker News Reader

California Should Be The Economic Model For America

professorhollybell.com

9 pointselfinlike24 comments

All of these horrible impediments to business are why California has such a horrible economy and complete lack of entrepreneurialism compared to more conservatively run states like Alabama and Arkansas.

EDIT: Oh, and the cited professor is from Alaska, the only state in the US that actually practices literal redistribution (you get a check from the oil companies just for living there). I'm sure she doesn't see it that way, though.

> California has such a horrible economy and complete lack of entrepreneurialism

Can you elaborate on what kind of policies towards entrepreneurship are better in Alabama and Arkansas? Seems to me that SF Bay Area and Los Angeles are both flourishing entrepreneurial havens [1]. I'd argue that the culture of innovation in California outweighs any economic policies that may be adverse to entrepreneurs.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/20/startup-genome-ranks-the-wo...

He was being sarcastic, but you are right.

California has always been the place to "make it big". From tech to movies to the gold rush, the recent economic policies (last 30 years or so) have little to do with it.

The proof's in the pudding. Look at CA, NY, MA, then look at Alabama. Every state that runs things the way the professor says they should is an economic shitshow with the exception of Texas, where there's oil and big liberal cities.

Are you arguing that Alabama would be better off imitating California's policies? Has it occurred to you that California has some natural advantages, none of which are attributable to its governance, that don't generalize to other states?

I'm arguing that if those policies were as awful as economic conservatives continually say, the West Coast and Northeast wouldn't be the best economies in the world.

There's clearly something positive to be gotten from investments in infrastructure and education.

You do realize that the economies in all of those places pre-date the policies they have now by a large margin, right?

California has, and always will be the gold rush state... taxes aren't going to change that.

Those policies have been in place since at least the New Deal, longer depending on how you want to quantify them.

If empiricism can't convince you, nothing can. Why even read my posts?

And the gold rush started in the 1840's, the NYSE was founded in the late 1700's.

What was that about empiricism?

Empiricism is believing the data.

The west coast and northeast have had a hundred years to fall apart because of their terrible liberal policies. They're doing great. The south and mountain west are much less economically impressive, despite their 'business friendly' policies.

So you've explained away 2 with anecdotes superior to data. 48 to go. Get started.

Also, by crediting the gold rush 150 years ago as being more relevant to California's current-day economy than it's horrible liberal policies, you're essentially saying that the actual policies don't matter.

The point of the article is that California's government is wasteful and the state horribly mismanaged. That people still find a way to make successful businesses here doesn't refute that point.

"California is making great progress toward income equality by eliminating the ability of the middle and upper classes to build wealth, and thereby eradicating greed."

Besides the dubious idea that it's good to eliminate the ability for the middle class to build wealth, I can't say I've seen much evidence that there's more income equality in California than the US in general. And if she thinks tax policy can "eradicate greed", she doesn't even understand human psychology.

(Oh, hey, I think I've been trolled.)

To the commenters preceding me: The piece is sarcastic. Read it again.

I agree that California has some great policies that other states should follow - but it's somewhat troubling that this article highlights some of the more negative aspects of CA:

> Implementing these taxes nation-wide would ensure the U.S. has the same air quality as Los Angeles.

California still has among the worst Air Quality ratings in the US [1]. Isn't it worth calling out that California needs to improve in this area? For instance, better public transit?

> California has the highest paid teachers in the U.S. and by focusing on teacher pay rather than student achievement (students rank 48th in math and 49th in reading), they have the best teachers in the country.

This hardly seems like a reason for California to pat itself on the back. If we are ranked so low in math & reading, what is the metric we're using to evaluate our teachers and determine that they're the "best in the country"?

[1] http://www.stateoftheair.org/2012/states/california/los-ange...

Because it's satire. She's making an example out of California.

What about Calfornia's $300bn+ debt?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/us/california-debt-higher-...

Holly should be doing something other than economics.

And if everyone imitated California's approach to primary education, perhaps CA wouldn't rank almost-last any more!

I don't know how anyone missed that this was sarcasm. However, I happen to currently be in California and lived here previously. I am fond of the state, while myself sometimes wondering why I am so fond of it, given the high cost of living and other problems. It fails to meet a lot of criteria I think I value. Yet, I came back and I am glad I did.

What comes to mind with reading the article is a Simcity game I played once. I typically go for super clean environmental measures and lots of other people-friendly characteristics. A consistent problem I run into is that I wind up getting complaints that property values are too high, it is too expensive for new industry. One day, to entertain my son, I let him set some goals and parameters. For shits and giggles, he wanted to see how quickly we could create an acid cloud disaster. I zoned lots of heavy industry and piled in the most polluting business deals, destroying the environment and dropping property values to never before seen lows. We quickly got our acid cloud. We also got the most humongous factories I had ever seen in the game.

I don't know which aspects of California are "features, not bugs". I do know that it has long broken new ground for environmental laws and policies. No doubt it did so in part because of pollution being "the smell of money", so to speak -- in other words existing business success. Some of our federal environmental laws were modeled on California precedents. The pollution here goes back a long way. So does significant progress on getting it under control. So I cannot take the criticisms of the article that seriously. Criticising the environmental policies here and implying they are broken because L.A. is very polluted really is idiotic. L.A. has substantially better air quality now than it had in the 1970's.

Furthermore, the spread out city layout so responsible for making L.A. all about "the cult of the car" preceded automobiles as the standard form of transportation. It was spread out like that when public transit was the norm. The reason: It is a desert and water gets imported from hundreds of miles away. It did not make financial sense to grow "organically". It only made financial sense to develop large tracts of land at once. That was the only means to justify or cover the high cost of necessary infrastructure.

Again, I also find myself baffled by what exactly is so great about California. It can be difficult to see past its many bigassed hairy warts to find the appeal. Yet I love it here and I increasingly wonder which "warts" are really bugs and which are evidence of important features which are just poorly understood.

I was willing to play along for a little while until I came across this:

> the small business failure rate is the highest in America at 69%

I then dismissed the entire article as a waste of time. More startups = more failures and that's actually a good thing. If you write something so fundamentally misinformed as if the policies are causing the higher failure rate, then your entire article is most probably bunk and full of similar non-sequitirs.

I couldn't tell if this article was being sarcastic or not.

It is.

Regarding "more startups = more failures", not on a percentage basis.

I think you're looking at it from a volume vs percentage aspect, in which you are correct, whereas what the commenter really meant is that startups are far more volatile and likely to fail.

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