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
The Price of Stagnation: Britain’s Retreat from Dynamism
We face a basic issue: we do not let cities or communities grow or die.
.jpg)
London and the Architecture of Creative Growth
Preserving London's creative dynamism will require humility from policymakers and a commitment to keeping the city liveable.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.webp)
Is Economics a Failure?
Rather than ending with “economics is broken,” Alexander Rosenberg’s deliberately provocative book 'Blunt Instrument' argues that “economics is useful for a different reason than economists often say.” That is a serious and worthwhile thesis.
Locke, Meet Claude
The concern is not regulation per se. It is a regulation that outruns its justification by arriving before the evidence, foreclosing the technology before its benefits are understood, and insulating the powerful from competition that would otherwise discipline them. That is the pattern worth resisting.
