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As several new private ventures to take people on trips to space come closer to becoming reality, California lawmakers are racing other states to woo the new space companies with cushy incentives.

Export manufacturing has recently become the unsung hero of the U.S. economy. Despite all the public focus on the U.S. trade deficit, little attention has been paid to the fact that the country’s exports have been growing more than seven times faster than GDP since 2005. As a share of the U.S. economy, in fact, exports are at their highest point in 50 years.

Anyone interested in exploring economic, demographic and other data about California and its communities – yours truly, for example – has had to work at it because there’s been no central repository. One must mine data from federal agencies such as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from state agencies such as the Employment Development Department, the Department of Education or the Department of Finance, or from private and academic data banks.

California has experienced negative domestic migration in recent years. The increase in the number of residents moving out of the Golden State to other places in the United States is often blamed on California’s high personal income taxes. In fact, this was one of the main arguments waged against the recently enacted Proposition 30, which raised the statewide income tax rate as a way to address the state’s fiscal woes. However, data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the perceived connection between out-migrants and the state’s income tax is likely overblown. Statistics on the characteristics of California’s inbound and outbound migrants suggest that the patterns in domestic migration over the past decade are more related to housing costs in the state than to the local income tax structure.

One of the biggest obstacles facing Americans today is a lack of opportunity and social mobility. While we have entry-level and high-end jobs, we have lost the jobs in the middle that helped each generation of Americans do better than the one before it. Some call this an “hourglass economy”; I tend to think of it as a canyon being hollowed out between the two ends of the job market.

Over the past 18 months, a group of plaintiffs’ lawyers who got rich suing the tobacco industry have turned their litigious attention to what they hope will be the next big thing: challenges to healthy-sounding food labels they allege are misleading. Hailing from across the U.S., the lawyers decided to sue in federal courts in Northern California, where the consumer-protection laws are expansive and the jury pool nutrition-conscious.

As the debate over the practice of hydraulic fracturing to reach deeply embedded oil heats up, listening to a discussion on the topic sponsored by Los Angeles’ BizFed Institute last week, I have the feeling we will see it happen. Or should I say continue to happen since fracking, as it is called, has been going on in California for 60 years.

That’s the opinion of David Crane, chief executive officer of NRG Energy, a wholesale power company based in Princeton, N.J. What’s afoot is a confluence of green energy and computer technology, deregulation, cheap natural gas, and political pressure that, as Crane starkly frames it, poses “a mortal threat to the existing utility system.” He says that in about the time it has taken cell phones to supplant land lines in most U.S. homes, the grid will become increasingly irrelevant as customers move toward decentralized homegrown green energy.

Over the past 18 months, a group of plaintiffs’ lawyers who got rich suing the tobacco industry have turned their litigious attention to what they hope will be the next big thing: challenges to healthy-sounding food labels they allege are misleading. Hailing from across the U.S., the lawyers decided to sue in federal courts in Northern California, where the consumer-protection laws are expansive and the jury pool nutrition-conscious.

The demand for labor explains a lot of migration patterns. Where the uneducated once moved to staff large industrial centers, now those with the means and a college education flock to feed the Innovation Economy that is rising from their ashes.

The California Business Roundtable will unveil its new database on the state’s economy Thursday morning.

CropScience, a division of Bayer AG, in West Sacramento, California. The new facility will serve as the U.S.-based R&D operations for the vegetable seed and crop protection products. The approximately 164,000-square-foot facility on ten acres will employ 300 at full capacity. The company will also acquire an additional non-contiguous site on which to construct a greenhouse and test plot facility. The project will have an economic impact of more than $127 million in output (the value of goods and services in the Sacramento Region economy on an annual basis generated through direct, indirect, and induced activities of the company.)

The insurance industry has provided over 210,00 jobs in 2010 and provided a payroll that totaled $14.9 billion, just in California!

Nearly 180 California hotels changed hands in the first half of 2013, a 12% increase from the number sold in same period last year, according to a mid-year report by Irvine consulting firm Atlas Hospitality Group.

Wells Fargo is cutting staff as higher rates cool residential mortgage lending, which has been on a tear in recent years.