Latest / INSIGHT TODAY / Why did 1.9M people leave California
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Here's my take.
- 0:01Speaker 2: At a time when President Trump and Republicans are faring
- 0:04Speaker 2: poorly in most polls, the story has been different.
- 0:07Speaker 1: In California.
- 0:09Speaker 2: Republican Steve Hilton finished ahead of many high spending Democrats
- 0:13Speaker 2: in the governor's race to advance to the November election
- 0:17Speaker 2: facing Democrat Javier Bessera. In Los Angeles, an overwhelmingly democratic city,
- 0:23Speaker 2: Spencer Pratt, a Republican former reality television personality, looked as
- 0:28Speaker 2: if he might make the mayoral general election before finishing third.
- 0:33Speaker 2: California Democrats will be tempted to dismiss all this as
- 0:36Speaker 2: a side show, but the frustration is real and justified.
- 0:42Speaker 2: California is one of the most dynamic places on the planet.
- 0:46Speaker 2: It has Silicon Valley, Hollywood, world class universities, extraordinary agriculture, ports, talent,
- 0:52Speaker 2: and natural beauty. But it is a case study in
- 0:56Speaker 2: how a rich society can spend more and more while
- 1:00Speaker 2: producing less and less of what its ordinary citizens need.
- 1:05Speaker 2: The paradox of California today is a successful economy attached to.
- 1:09Speaker 1: A failing model of governance. Consider the fiscal record.
- 1:14Speaker 2: Since two thousand, California's population has grown by roughly fifteen percent,
- 1:19Speaker 2: but The state's general expenditures have grown more than two
- 1:23Speaker 2: hundred percent, from seventy eight billion to about two hundred
- 1:28Speaker 2: and forty eight billion dollars. General spending per person has
- 1:32Speaker 2: risen from about two thousand, three hundred to about six
- 1:35Speaker 2: three hundred dollars. The number of state employees has grown
- 1:38Speaker 2: by more than fifty percent. By one count, does anyone
- 1:42Speaker 2: think that California government and its benefits have gotten two
- 1:46Speaker 2: hundred percent better in the last twenty five years.
- 1:50Speaker 1: Housing is the central failure.
- 1:52Speaker 2: California has long spoken the language of compassion while building
- 1:56Speaker 2: a system of exclusion. Alicia Finley writes in The Wall
- 2:00Speaker 2: Street Journal that from twenty twenty one to twenty twenty four,
- 2:05Speaker 2: the La Metro Area, with nearly thirteen million people, issued
- 2:09Speaker 2: only one hundred and eighteen thousand building permits for new homes. Atlanta,
- 2:14Speaker 2: with about half that population, issued one hundred and sixty
- 2:18Speaker 2: three thousand. California has made it too hard, slow, and
- 2:23Speaker 2: expensive to build. The result is predictable home prices soar,
- 2:27Speaker 2: Rents rise, workers commute, father homelessness grows, young people leave,
- 2:33Speaker 2: and people are leaving. Over the past seven years, the
- 2:37Speaker 2: state has lost a net one point nine million people
- 2:40Speaker 2: through domestic migration. For generations, people moved to California to
- 2:46Speaker 2: pursue the future. Now many middle class people are leaving
- 2:51Speaker 2: because they can't afford one or look at education. For years,
- 2:55Speaker 2: California schools had a plausible excuse they were underfunded. Spending
- 3:00Speaker 2: on education through twelfth grade has more than doubled since
- 3:04Speaker 2: the early twenty tens, and per pupil spending by twenty
- 3:07Speaker 2: twenty three was well above the national average, Yet the
- 3:11Speaker 2: results remain dismal. In the twenty twenty four Nations report Card,
- 3:16Speaker 2: California was forty third in fourth grade math, thirty ninth
- 3:21Speaker 2: in fourth grade reading, thirty sixth in eighth grade math,
- 3:25Speaker 2: and thirty eighth in eighth grade reading. Homelessness tells the
- 3:29Speaker 2: same story in a more painful register. A twenty twenty
- 3:33Speaker 2: four audit revealed California had spent twenty four billion dollars
- 3:36Speaker 2: on the problem over a five year span, Yet in
- 3:39Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, California reached a record high in homelessness,
- 3:44Speaker 2: almost two hundred thousand. Homelessness did decline by about three
- 3:48Speaker 2: percent from twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five, but
- 3:52Speaker 2: the state's expansive, expensive, and elaborate homelessness aid complex has
- 3:57Speaker 2: not proven to solve homelessness in any significant way. California's
- 4:03Speaker 2: headline prosperity, generated in good part by a few industries
- 4:07Speaker 2: like high tech masks, weaknesses underneath.
- 4:11Speaker 1: Job creation has been sluggish.
- 4:13Speaker 2: In twenty twenty five, California essentially failed to add any
- 4:17Speaker 2: new jobs on net. Private industries outside government and government
- 4:22Speaker 2: supported healthcare actually shed jobs. According to the Center for
- 4:26Speaker 2: Jobs in the Economy, the state is using public spending
- 4:29Speaker 2: to paper over private sector stagnation. Nowhere is this more
- 4:34Speaker 2: vivid than Los Angeles, where Hollywood, the city's defining industry,
- 4:39Speaker 2: is in slow motion collapse. The effects are being felt
- 4:42Speaker 2: not by celebrity actors and influencers, but the carpenters, costumers,
- 4:47Speaker 2: sound engineers, camera operators, editors, drivers, caterers, dry cleaners, prop houses,
- 4:53Speaker 2: and small businesses that once formed one of the world's
- 4:57Speaker 2: great industrial clusters.
- 5:00Speaker 1: The numbers are stock.
- 5:01Speaker 2: One report found LA shoot days fell from thirty six thousand,
- 5:05Speaker 2: seven hundred and ninety two and twenty twenty two to
- 5:08Speaker 2: just nineteen thousand, six hundred and ninety four in twenty
- 5:11Speaker 2: twenty five. Another report estimates, Film television and sound jobs
- 5:16Speaker 2: fell by nearly thirty percent. Motion picture employment in La
- 5:21Speaker 2: County fell from about one hundred and forty two thousand
- 5:24Speaker 2: at the end of twenty twenty two to roughly one
- 5:26Speaker 2: hundred thousand two years later. Hollywood is still the symbol,
- 5:30Speaker 2: the brand, the mythology, and it still houses the big
- 5:33Speaker 2: studios that produced most of the world's greatest entertainment for
- 5:37Speaker 2: almost a century, but thanks largely to high taxes, costs,
- 5:41Speaker 2: and regulations, the work has moved elsewhere to Georgia, New Jersey, Toronto, London,
- 5:47Speaker 2: and Warsaw. Michael Linton, who ran Sony Entertainment, told me
- 5:52Speaker 2: that the big studio lots look like ghost towns now
- 5:56Speaker 2: with tens of acres of sound stages and recording studios
- 6:00Speaker 2: when nothing is happening, He said, Los Angeles is becoming
- 6:06Speaker 2: a sunny version of Detroit. Consider the simple fact, according
- 6:10Speaker 2: to Fortune, none of the ten films nominated for Best
- 6:14Speaker 2: Picture this year were primarily produced in Hollywood. Los Angeles
- 6:19Speaker 2: still hosts the Oscars, but increasingly it does not actually
- 6:23Speaker 2: make the movies being honored there. For years, Democrats in
- 6:27Speaker 2: California have governed without any real competition. The recent primary
- 6:32Speaker 2: results suggest that even in deep blue territory, voters are restless.
- 6:37Speaker 2: They're not becoming Republicans, but they are asking a reasonable question,
- 6:43Speaker 2: why does a state with so much money, talent, and
- 6:46Speaker 2: promise make life for ordinary people so hard? A new
- 6:51Speaker 2: Reuter's ipsos poll out this week finds that more than
- 6:55Speaker 2: half of Americans believe AI could put them or someone
- 6:59Speaker 2: in their house hold out of a job, and yet
- 7:02Speaker 2: unemployment in May sat at just four point three percent,
- 7:05Speaker 2: well below the historic average of five point sixty six percent.
- 7:09Speaker 1: So what is really going on?
- 7:12Speaker 2: Is AI actually displacing workers or is the fear outpacing
- 7:16Speaker 2: the reality joining us now To help make sense of
- 7:18Speaker 2: all of this is Molly Kinder, who studies AI's impact
- 7:22Speaker 2: on jobs. So, Molly explain that paradox, everyone is worried
- 7:26Speaker 2: about AI already. You do hear some companies say they're
- 7:29Speaker 2: not hiring or they're letting go of ten percent of
- 7:32Speaker 2: their programmers, but it isn't showing up in the aggregate data.
- 7:37Speaker 3: So fred I think the anxiety we are seeing permeating
- 7:41Speaker 3: society is not about where AI is right now or
- 7:45Speaker 3: where jobs are right now. It's where we're going. So
- 7:47Speaker 3: it is correct that right now the labor market data
- 7:49Speaker 3: does not yet reflect a serious impact on jobs. What
- 7:54Speaker 3: we are entering is something I call the messy middle.
- 7:57Speaker 3: As we move forward and as AI technologies get better,
- 8:00Speaker 3: that's when we're going to start seeing impacts on jobs.
- 8:03Speaker 3: Not a full job's apocalypse, but we're going to start
- 8:05Speaker 3: seeing select jobs, select occupations, really be impacted.
- 8:09Speaker 2: Where are you seeing the most likely I mean people
- 8:13Speaker 2: have talked about programming, but take us through what is
- 8:15Speaker 2: the nature of the jobs that are going to be
- 8:17Speaker 2: displaced in this first in this messy middle.
- 8:20Speaker 3: So in this messy middle, the jobs that are going
- 8:22Speaker 3: to be the frontline of displacement are jobs that are
- 8:25Speaker 3: primarily at a computer. I have a strap line. If
- 8:27Speaker 3: you can do your job locked in a closet with
- 8:29Speaker 3: a computer, eventually you're going to probably be in trouble.
- 8:32Speaker 3: Think about it as the reverse of COVID. The people
- 8:36Speaker 3: that were at risk during COVID of the virus had
- 8:39Speaker 3: to go into a workplace, whether it was a hospital
- 8:42Speaker 3: or a school or a repair shop. Those of us
- 8:46Speaker 3: in the laptop class could stay at home safely and
- 8:48Speaker 3: type on our computer and be safe. We're going to
- 8:50Speaker 3: see a reverse when we think of the risk jobs
- 8:53Speaker 3: that AAI is best able to substitute for tend to
- 8:57Speaker 3: be cognitive tasks that are primarily on at a computer
- 9:01Speaker 3: that has pretty profound political implications. Because these are some
- 9:04Speaker 3: of the most coveted best jobs in the economy. These
- 9:07Speaker 3: are the jobs that in past decades have been the
- 9:09Speaker 3: winners of the technological changes. We could start seeing that reversing.
- 9:14Speaker 2: So Excel came was created by Microsoft, and everyone said,
- 9:18Speaker 2: we won't need accountants anymore because everyone can now do
- 9:21Speaker 2: these spreadsheets. And in fact what happened was because Excel
- 9:26Speaker 2: was then cheaply available, everybody did spreadsheet analysis, and actually
- 9:30Speaker 2: the number of accountants grew, and you know, there was
- 9:33Speaker 2: a kind of new demand for the product.
- 9:36Speaker 1: Agency.
- 9:37Speaker 2: Could AI result, for example, in people needing to do
- 9:41Speaker 2: all kinds of new stuff that we haven't thought about.
- 9:43Speaker 3: I think there are many reasons for optimism that the economy,
- 9:48Speaker 3: even with very smart AI, is going to generate new jobs.
- 9:52Speaker 3: There is also certainly going to be instances whereas say
- 9:56Speaker 3: legal services get cheaper, maybe there will be more demand
- 9:58Speaker 3: for cheaper legal services and you might see some of
- 10:00Speaker 3: that work grow. That being said, I think most economists
- 10:05Speaker 3: would agree that there is likely to be some concentrated displacement,
- 10:10Speaker 3: even if overall the job numbers hold flat and we
- 10:13Speaker 3: don't see a job's apocalypse. If we start to see
- 10:16Speaker 3: displacement in concentrated pockets like we did in the industrialization.
- 10:21Speaker 3: If you think back to the last several decades in
- 10:24Speaker 3: the Heartland, overall, our economy was strong, the numbers were
- 10:28Speaker 3: going up in terms of GDP and job numbers, and
- 10:31Speaker 3: yet you had this concentrated loss of jobs in the
- 10:34Speaker 3: middle of the income spectrum in manufacturing, and that caused
- 10:38Speaker 3: huge political and social pain. We could see something similar
- 10:44Speaker 3: if enough pockets of white collar work. AI isn't just
- 10:48Speaker 3: something that augments, it actually substitutes. If we start seeing
- 10:52Speaker 3: that in certain pockets, I think we are going to
- 10:55Speaker 3: face a similar political and social backlash that we saw
- 10:58Speaker 3: in the industrialization,