California Should Be The Economic Model For America

http://www.professorhollybell.com/2012/12/17/california-should-be-the-economic-model-for-america/

by elfinlike • 14 years ago

9 24 14 years ago

jbooth5• 14 years ago

All of these horrible impediments to business are why California has such a horrible economy and complete lack of entrepreneurialism compared to more conservatively run states like Alabama and Arkansas.

EDIT: Oh, and the cited professor is from Alaska, the only state in the US that actually practices literal redistribution (you get a check from the oil companies just for living there). I'm sure she doesn't see it that way, though.

alook2• 14 years ago

> California has such a horrible economy and complete lack of entrepreneurialism

Can you elaborate on what kind of policies towards entrepreneurship are better in Alabama and Arkansas? Seems to me that SF Bay Area and Los Angeles are both flourishing entrepreneurial havens [1]. I'd argue that the culture of innovation in California outweighs any economic policies that may be adverse to entrepreneurs.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/20/startup-genome-ranks-the-wo...

dr_doom• 14 years ago

He was being sarcastic, but you are right.

California has always been the place to "make it big". From tech to movies to the gold rush, the recent economic policies (last 30 years or so) have little to do with it.

tupuli2• 14 years ago

The point of the article is that California's government is wasteful and the state horribly mismanaged. That people still find a way to make successful businesses here doesn't refute that point.

jgmatpdx• 14 years ago

And if everyone imitated California's approach to primary education, perhaps CA wouldn't rank almost-last any more!

recoiledsnake• 14 years ago

I was willing to play along for a little while until I came across this:

> the small business failure rate is the highest in America at 69%

I then dismissed the entire article as a waste of time. More startups = more failures and that's actually a good thing. If you write something so fundamentally misinformed as if the policies are causing the higher failure rate, then your entire article is most probably bunk and full of similar non-sequitirs.

washedup• 14 years ago

I couldn't tell if this article was being sarcastic or not.

Scramblejams2• 14 years ago

It is.

elfinlike• 14 years ago

Regarding "more startups = more failures", not on a percentage basis.

ryankey721• 14 years ago

I think you're looking at it from a volume vs percentage aspect, in which you are correct, whereas what the commenter really meant is that startups are far more volatile and likely to fail.

sigzero• 14 years ago

Holly should be doing something other than economics.

mmagin• 14 years ago

"California is making great progress toward income equality by eliminating the ability of the middle and upper classes to build wealth, and thereby eradicating greed."

Besides the dubious idea that it's good to eliminate the ability for the middle class to build wealth, I can't say I've seen much evidence that there's more income equality in California than the US in general. And if she thinks tax policy can "eradicate greed", she doesn't even understand human psychology.

(Oh, hey, I think I've been trolled.)

Scramblejams2• 14 years ago

To the commenters preceding me: The piece is sarcastic. Read it again.

alook2• 14 years ago

I agree that California has some great policies that other states should follow - but it's somewhat troubling that this article highlights some of the more negative aspects of CA:

> Implementing these taxes nation-wide would ensure the U.S. has the same air quality as Los Angeles.

California still has among the worst Air Quality ratings in the US [1]. Isn't it worth calling out that California needs to improve in this area? For instance, better public transit?

> California has the highest paid teachers in the U.S. and by focusing on teacher pay rather than student achievement (students rank 48th in math and 49th in reading), they have the best teachers in the country.

This hardly seems like a reason for California to pat itself on the back. If we are ranked so low in math & reading, what is the metric we're using to evaluate our teachers and determine that they're the "best in the country"?

[1] http://www.stateoftheair.org/2012/states/california/los-ange...

joshrice• 14 years ago

Because it's satire. She's making an example out of California.

cjreyes• 14 years ago

What about Calfornia's $300bn+ debt?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/us/california-debt-higher-...

Mz• 14 years ago

I don't know how anyone missed that this was sarcasm. However, I happen to currently be in California and lived here previously. I am fond of the state, while myself sometimes wondering why I am so fond of it, given the high cost of living and other problems. It fails to meet a lot of criteria I think I value. Yet, I came back and I am glad I did.

What comes to mind with reading the article is a Simcity game I played once. I typically go for super clean environmental measures and lots of other people-friendly characteristics. A consistent problem I run into is that I wind up getting complaints that property values are too high, it is too expensive for new industry. One day, to entertain my son, I let him set some goals and parameters. For shits and giggles, he wanted to see how quickly we could create an acid cloud disaster. I zoned lots of heavy industry and piled in the most polluting business deals, destroying the environment and dropping property values to never before seen lows. We quickly got our acid cloud. We also got the most humongous factories I had ever seen in the game.

I don't know which aspects of California are "features, not bugs". I do know that it has long broken new ground for environmental laws and policies. No doubt it did so in part because of pollution being "the smell of money", so to speak -- in other words existing business success. Some of our federal environmental laws were modeled on California precedents. The pollution here goes back a long way. So does significant progress on getting it under control. So I cannot take the criticisms of the article that seriously. Criticising the environmental policies here and implying they are broken because L.A. is very polluted really is idiotic. L.A. has substantially better air quality now than it had in the 1970's.

Furthermore, the spread out city layout so responsible for making L.A. all about "the cult of the car" preceded automobiles as the standard form of transportation. It was spread out like that when public transit was the norm. The reason: It is a desert and water gets imported from hundreds of miles away. It did not make financial sense to grow "organically". It only made financial sense to develop large tracts of land at once. That was the only means to justify or cover the high cost of necessary infrastructure.

Again, I also find myself baffled by what exactly is so great about California. It can be difficult to see past its many bigassed hairy warts to find the appeal. Yet I love it here and I increasingly wonder which "warts" are really bugs and which are evidence of important features which are just poorly understood.

California Should Be The Economic Model For America

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