The Hollowing of California

I don’t think that Francis Wilkinson is reading the statistics correctly in his Bloomberg piece on Californians moving to Texas:

According to a Sacramento Bee review of Census data, “Every year from 2000 through 2015, more people left California than moved in from other states.”

The departures are, in some broad sense, linked to a failure of liberalism. “The people leaving tend to be relatively poor, and many lack college degrees,” the Bee reported. “Move higher up the income spectrum, and slightly more people are coming than going.”

In other words, while California is a very nice place to be rich, and is attracting more affluent people as a result, it’s hard to get by there if you’re poor or working class, especially in California’s marquee cities.

What I think is happening is that those with from one standard deviation below median income to one standard deviation above median income, i.e. from family incomes of about $40,000 to family incomes of about $80,000, particularly the native born, are leaving California in large numbers and being replaced by immigrants from the extreme ends of the income distribution. If you think those leaving are the poor, you’ve been living in an affluent neighborhood too long.

When he was defeated in his bid for re-election to the U. S. Congress, the frontiersman (and general character) Davy Crockett famously declaimed “You can all go to hell. I’m going to Texas.” I think that’s pretty much what’s happening in California now.

The Golden State is in the midst of a great experiment to determine whether a state can build a viable economy based on the affluent, the poor, and public retirees. I wish them all the luck in the world but I don’t think it’s a model open to most other states and not to Illinois in particular.