Speaking of California, the pie chart above is a simplified representation of the California economy. The source for the data is the Bureau of Economic Analysis. As you can see government forms a very large component of the state’s economy (especially when you include upwards of 50% of health and education as government) as does real estate. Manufacturing is a smaller proportion of the California economy than it is in many states.
Here’s the corresponding pie chart for the U. S. as a whole:
Same source. When you take into account how large California’s economy is (a little less than an eighth of the U. S. economy) and that the U. S. pie chart includes California, it highlights how greatly different California is from the rest of the country.
I don’t believe that demographics is destiny. I don’t even believe that demographics plus economics is destiny. But I do believe that they’re a reasonably good first order approximation.
Consequently, rather than criticizing the political attitudes of Californians or, if you live in California, those of the rest of the country, keep in mind that the view from California is different.
BTW, if you’re wondering what state is most like the U. S. as a whole demographically and economically, that would be Illinois, something that should give you pause. The country as a whole has a much higher percentage black population than California, a higher percentage of whites, and a much lower percentage of Hispanics.
An interesting question would be what state is the most average, the most representative in demographics and economy, excluding California? I don’t know but I’m guessing Missouri.
I guess I’m unusual in that I don’t care much about the political attitudes of Californians (or people from any other state). What I do care about are a different kind of immigrant – Californians who flee the high taxes and cost of living for places like Colorado. I had the same issue with Texans in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, though they came for oil development (and left after it crashed).
My general attitude towards politics in other states is that the residents of those states are entitled to do any blame fool thing they care to, within the restrictions of federal law. However, I do have a problem with residents of California proposing California as a model for anything other than California as well as people who don’t live in California wanting to dictate policy for California.
I must be missing something. The two charts are in many instances not comparable. The national chart breaks government down by federal and local, 5% and 9% respectively, the California chart has only a single category, 12%. So, we have less government?
Arts and Entertainment is 4% national and not included in California? Where did Hollywood disappear to? Wholesale and retail are each 6% of national and what, 0% of California? And yet, I have seen stores here. These charts are apples and oranges, different categories, different lines of division. I don’t see how one draws any conclusion.
Yes, it’s hard to compare them. If I had been able to find a completely comparable set of stats I would have used them.
It could be. In California government at all levels is 12% of the total economy. In the U. S. overall federal plus state government is 14%. What proportion of that is California? Assuming it’s proportional to California’s role in the U. S. that would mean that government’s role in the economy is greater elsewhere than in California.
Other examples of discrepancies between the two charts are manufacturing and trade. The California chart lumps durable and non-durable manufacturing into a single “Manufacturing” category. Since for the U. S. durable plus non-durable is 12% of the total while for California manufacturing is 10% and California accounts for an eighth of the total that suggests that manufacturing is significantly less important there than elsewhere in the country, probably 25% less important. In the California chart “Trade, transportation, and utilities” is 16% while in the U. S. chart wholesale plus retail plus utilities plus waste services is 17% in the rest of the country outside California that category is probably somewhat higher than it is in California.
I could have edited these data to make the charts easier to compare but I elected to just report them as I found them.
The point is that California is not a microcosm of the United States and the U. S. ex-California doesn’t look much like California. That should be apparent even with the inadequacies of the charts and data I could lay my hands on easily.
There’s also a major difference in income inequality between California and the U. S. ex-California. It’s significantly more aggravated in California than in the U. S. overall.
So are racial demographics. The percentage of blacks in the U. S. overall is about 12%; in California it’s 8% (that means it’s higher than 12% in the U. S. ex-California. The percentage of Hispanics in the U. S. overall is about 17%; in California it’s about 38% (that means it’s a lot less in the U. S. ex-California than in California).
I didn’t derive much from those 2 charts, either. However, I do agree that CA is different from other states, especially in it’s growing, embittered political divide.
Along the coast, resides the state’s wealth – high tech companies, expensive real estate, the glamous entertainment industry. In the interior live the “common folk,” farmers, rural communities. Each, though bound together within the borders of the same state, are nonerheless diametrically opposed in their political philosophies. When you add in CA’s extremes of enormous poverty (contrasting it’s glitsy wealth), a large Hispanic population with a substantial portion here illegally, and the ungainly power of public sector unions, this state really doesn’t have much inherent cohesive stability should it’s boat ever be rocked too dramatically by some catastrophical event.
Does this help? I’ve tried to make the two datasets more consistent:
Dave:
I completely agree that we are outliers. Silicon Valley, Hollywood, an agricultural sector that is larger than Texas and Iowa combined. As I’ve said before we are the pretty girl at the dance – 800 miles of beaches, snow-capped mountains, forests, desert, and the best weather on planet earth. People will always want to come here, drought, fires and earthquakes notwithstanding. If you told Apple employees they had to move to West Virginia we’d have a mass suicide event in Cupertino.
We are the future – information technology, higher education, entertainment, with our minds and our ports open to China, Japan and South Korea. Illinois, much as I loved Evanston and continue to love Chicago’s great chefs, is the past.
I think in the California mentality it’s us, Washington state, Oregon, Hawaii, and our colonies in Las Vegas and Tahoe forming a unit. We have feelings of simpatico for New York, New England and possibly Colorado. And no interest in the rust belt and the Confederacy, which are backward, ignorant, corrupt and a bit evil from our perspective. I think the question of secession was settled in 1865, but a sort of soft secession, a psychological distancing of ourselves from the rest of the country is accelerating. And bear in mind that whereas the Confederacy was poor and backward and reliant on slave labor, we are rich and possess the industries of the future. All the North ever really needed from the South was navigation rights on the Mississippi, but the USA minus California, Washington and Oregon would barely have a tech industry or an entertainment industry or an aerospace business, not to mention agriculture. I wonder, if secession were possible, which currency would be more valued, the US Dollar or the California currency which I, personally, believe should be called the California Dude.
Oh, man, I did not mean to make work for you just because I can’t read a chart!
Way back when I was offered a free ride through college if I’d become an actuary after graduation. If you’ve ever met an actuary, you’ll have no difficulty in understanding why I turned the scholarship down.
However, I can look at charts or columns of figures and see the patterns and trends.
I think I’ve mentioned it before but I had the same SAT scores as Bill Gates—just with the verbal and math reversed. I think that’s why I’m not very impressed by smart people.
Frankly, I doubt it. I think that California represents one possibility for the future: a handful of mostly white, East Asian, and South Asian grandees and lots of Hispanic peónes. The reason that California has Prop. 19 is that the grandees wanted servants but didn’t want to pay to educate the servants’ children. If you think that California resembles Oregon or Washington, you must mean Northern California because you can’t possibly be thinking about Southern California. Something like 60% of California’s total population lives in the southern third of the state, from Santa Barbara on south.
Texas represents another possibility for the future, Washington another, Virginia yet another. If I had to place a bet, my money would be behind Virginia’s being a closer model.
However, I think that California should be allowed to be California.
No question. My eldest and I have a weird obsession with British game shows, one of which, Only Connect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSehd5J8lnA is a fiendishly hard trivia quiz. We rate the questions we miss (most) by how much longer it would have taken us to get the answer, sometimes an extra 20 seconds, sometimes we’d never get there (anything to do with ‘footie.’) I could probably get statistics, but it would be a long, slow slog to reach a gentleman’s C. Exactly the opposite with words.
I love British game shows, too.
I am one of the fortunate few who has some facility with words and numbers. And I love trivia. My wife has occasionally quipped that being married to me saved her the price of an encyclopedia. 😉
Or unfortunate few. It means I’m never really satisfied with what I’m doing. The modern day is just too specialized. I wouldn’t have been really happy with the practice of law (words) or as an actuary (numbers).
Well, the second US graph is less fractured. However, CA is really a country unto itself, along with a culture that seems to imbibe in larger doses of creativity, rebellion, narcissism, melting pot demographics that are second to none in this Republic.
While I can’t stop loving the state of my birth, I continue to find it’s social progressive dominance, accentuated leniency towards illegal immigrants, climate change obsession, obscene billions proposed on high speed trains, the construction of illogical public sector pension plans fiscally squeezing communities are troubling and not beneficial for the long range health of the state.
“I wouldn’t have been really happy with the practice of law (words) or as an actuary (numbers).”
Tax law. Facility with both would help. Granted, it would be numbers and not really math se.
Steve
I was thinking non-fiction writing, science or econ for example. We could really use some science reporters who can put the inevitably overblown press releases into context.
As I think I’ve mentioned before the first job my dad got when he got out of law school (and back from Europe) was as an editorial writer for the old St. Louis Star. I’ve re-published some of his old editorials from time to time.
Working class Americana Cal is Trump land.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/19/oroville-dam-president-trump-governor-jerry-brown-feud-funding-conservative/98129510/