Thumbing through the annual report of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is always an education. This year’s 430-page edition is no exception. Crammed with tables and charts, it brims with useful facts and insights.
What this means is that the suburbs as a whole are now equally, if not more diverse, than the populations living in most urban cores. They also are generally less ethnically segregated.
Cochrane shows the power of economic growth on individuals by demonstrating when the United States enjoyed 3.5% economic growth from 1950 to 2000, an individual’s income rose from $16,000 to $50,000 (measured in 2009 dollars.) Had the economy grown at 2%–about the growth rate the country has experienced since 2000—the individual’s income would be $23,000, not $50,000. Quite a difference.
Only four states have black unemployment rates that are now lower than the national average for black workers: Texas, New York, New Jersey and Tennessee. Those states also had rates that were lower than the national average for black workers before the recession hit.
Knowing that net out-migrants are more likely to be middle-class working young professional families provides some hints as to why people are leaving California for greener pastures. For one, California is an extraordinarily high cost-of-living state. Whether it is the state’s housing affordability crisis – California’s median home value per square foot is, on average, 2.1 times higher than Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington’s – California’s very expensive energy costs – the state’s residential electric price is about 1.5 times higher than the competing states – or the Golden State’s oppressive tax burden – California ranks 6th, nationally, in state-local tax burdens – those living in California are hit with a variety of higher bills, which cuts into their bottom line.
First, part-time employment is a significant part of employment in California, up to nearly 20% of the California workforce. It grew from 17.7% of the workforce in December 2005 to over 21% in December 2011 during the Great Recession. It has gone down since December 2011, but at December 2015 was well-above pre-Great Recession levels.
The Labor Department’s recent release of biennial job market forecasts shows that the fastest-growing jobs tend to favor workers with more education, workers in jobs dominated by women and workers in urban areas, according to analyses by Jed Kolko, an economist based in San Francisco.
In contrast, California’s new conservatism, often misleadingly called progressivism, seeks to prevent change by discouraging everything – from the construction of new job-generating infrastructure to virtually any kind of family-friendly housing. The resulting ill-effects on the state’s enormous population of poor and near-poor – roughly-one third of households – have been profound, although widely celebrated by the state’s gentry class.
The overall U.S. population is aging. As the top graph shows, the percent of the population between 16 and 64 years of age (generally considered working age) has been declining since about 2007. At the same time, the percent of the population 65 years and older has been increasing. . . As the working age population shrinks relative to the total, the dependency burden (the ratio of dependent young and old to those of working age) increases.
Two states, Minnesota and Massachusetts, have had 13 years of net domestic migration losses out of the last 14 years. Another nine states have had 14 years of net domestic migration losses out of 14. New York has suffered the largest loss, at 2,278,000 and the largest loss in percentage terms, 12.0%. California, also losing each of 14 years lost 1,739,000 net domestic migrants while Illinois lost 1,027,000 net domestic migrants in 14 years of losses.
Altogether 45 percent of the nation’s population growth occurred in the three Sun Belt states: Texas, California and Florida. But it was from quite different sources. In Texas and Florida, there was more net migration from other states — domestic inflow — than immigration. This was true also of the fast-growing North Carolina, South Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and Washington. . . The high-immigration states plus Illinois have had the nation’s highest rates of domestic outflow, reflecting high tax rates, heavy regulation and high housing prices.
In a new study by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, we found that the best cities for middle-class families tend to be located outside the largest metropolitan areas. This was based on such factors housing affordability, migration, income growth, commute times, and middle-income jobs.
The employment patterns of immigrants differ from those of U.S.-born workers across industries and states. This interactive captures the variation by measuring the employment distribution ratio, which compares the likelihood that an immigrant worker is employed in each of 13 industries with that of an U.S.-born worker in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
If these trends continue – and there’s no reason to believe they won’t – the redrawing of legislative and congressional districts should see a noticeable shift from Southern California to Northern California and particularly the Bay Area.
On the macro level, California is finally coming out of the Great Recession, but on a micro level, this recovery is precariously balanced on the shoulders of one region. If something were to happen to the Silicon Valley-Bay Area region, the Golden State currently has no Plan B. This isn’t meant as a critique of the other regions of California, but rather a critique of how Sacramento has largely been blinded by the macro-level data to the detriment of exploring ways to spur growth in a more diversified manner.