Why Is California Losing Good Jobs to Other States? It’s Not Rocket Science
The system that made California dynamic and prosperous for so long is now broken and backward-looking.
For a century, it worked, and brilliantly. The “California model” rested on massive investments in higher education, development of industrial zones in places such as the South Bay and Silicon Valley, and persistent upgrading of basic infrastructure.
Yet the system that made California dynamic and prosperous for so long is now broken and backward-looking. The state still provides ample opportunities for technological and financial elites but leaves behind a broad spectrum of the middle and working classes.
This failure is reflected in the state’s poverty and unemployment rates (both the highest in the nation), and its tepid job growth. Meanwhile other states — Texas, Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas and Tennessee, for example — have copied the California model and they have done it, as Californians once did, based on the goal of lifting up all classes. Long reactionary in their politics and social structure, these states’ business-friendly policies now have something to teach the progressive Golden State.
Economic Dynamism
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