Revolutionizing California’s Schools

California has embarked on a bold experiment in education. Policy shifts like the new Common Core State Standards and the governor’s Local Control Funding Formula make local school districts dramatically more autonomous. Such changes provide a golden opportunity to transform education’s much derided one-size-fits-all factory model into something, frankly, more human. So how might your local school district take advantage of […]

Is California Reform finished?

California has embodied the new frontier since the Gold Rush. Stag Hunt’s inaugural magazine gets in that pioneering spirit by exploring how we might build a government in California that reflects the globalized and technologically connected world we live in.  Below co-founder Patrick Atwater outlines the challenges Stag Hunt aspires to tackle. For the first […]

A Prize for Tech Solutions to California’s Problems

What if the fuel for California’s next great Gold Rush lay buried within its governmental bureaucracy?  Not through some policy or program mind you but in the revolutionary power of technology to transform what constitutes government. That augurs some nontrivial potential for the human condition.  In his most recent inaugural address, Governor Brown reflected on […]

Los Angeles’ Challenge in One Chart

Below we show employment growth in Los Angles and San Francisco since 1990.  Note LA County has added about 1 million residents over this period.  San Franscisco has about flatlined. This trend is larger than the recent financial crisis. It’s larger than a business tax rate or industrial policy of a single city. Much larger.

California’s Next Gold Rush

On this day, 164 years ago, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California.  In Carey McWilliams’ apt phrase, the ensuing Gold Rush “got California off to a flying start, and set in motion its chain-reaction, explosive, self-generating pattern of development” according to a simple, even magical equation: “gold equals energy.” From computer […]

Rethinking Redevelopment

Barring a legislative miracle, the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn AB 27 has ended redevelopment as we know it in California.   So rather than continuing a protracted legal and political struggle that ultimately only will do harm to California, why not use this development as an opportunity to rethink redevelopment so that it better […]

California’s Gold and California’s Governance

There’s always a bit of a hangover
after an election.  You never get exactly
the results you want, but culminating events like elections also beget
introspection and reflection.  As the
sound and fury of campaign season dies down, we have the opportunity to look at
the broader historical context that has led to California’s dysfunctional
government and what this election really means.  

We need to remember that California
is more than a state.  It is a state of
mind defined by possibility.  California
took America’s Dream of a better life and imbued it with the sense that not
just material opportunity – a good home, a good job, and the ability to provide
a better life for your kids – but really anything was possible on California’s
Golden shore.