Every now and then, something happens to cause California’s comfortable establishment to celebrate the state’s economy. Recent budget surpluses and jobs data have provided several
Californians attend innumerable conferences on housing and economic growth. Year after year, in counties across California, the same people show up to say and hear
I recently made a couple of tweets/Facebook posts pointing out that market declines threaten California’s budget surplus. I referenced articles in the WSJ and Bloomberg, and I thought
Over the past 18 months, I’ve spent a lot of time in East Tennessee, Appalachia if you will. You can’t avoid poverty in East Tennessee.
California is undergoing profound change. Most strikingly, people are leaving the Golden State, which was once the preferred destination of migrants worldwide. California’s domestic migration
The problem with analyzing California’s economy — or with assessing its vigor — is that there is not one California economy. Instead, we have a
California is a place of extremes. It has beaches, mountains, valleys and deserts. It has glaciers and, just a few miles away, hot, dry deserts.
California’s political class, led by Governor Brown, has been patting itself on the back for solving California’s problems. This celebration is ludicrous. What they’ve done
Crossposted on newgeography The preferred story for California’s economy runs like this: In the beginning there was prosperity. It started with gold. Then, agriculture thrived