[Puffer Fish]

How California Destroyed its Middle Class (A Cautionary Tale) | Victor Davis Hanson, Founding Values

It's an excellent video, and I like the guy speaking, but I mostly disagree with his explanation.
The biggest factor, in that state, has been the large amounts of foreign immigration (half of it illegal immigration). That caused overcrowding, led to housing shortages, and drove up cost of living.
Many of the wacky Progressive Democrat policies in that state have not helped, of course.
However, I don't want debate the issue of immigration in this discussion. Let's focus on the issues raised in the video.

[Rich]

Let's focus on the issues raised in the video.

While he said a lot that sounded plausible, I was struck by his use of the term "Medieval". Until recently I'd just accepted the Liberals claim that Medieval inequality was greater than our own times. But recently doubt has crept in. Did Anglo Saxon Britain really have a higher gini coefficient than modern day America?

[late]

Hansen is a nut.

California is complicated, but I will give you an example why. There used to be a thing called the California lifestyle. A blue collar guy could afford an employee (this is in a one income family). A lawyer could afford to have staff, a cook, a gardener, someone for child care.

Immigration made that possible.

Underlying their other problems, California has the problems of success.

[Puffer Fish]

California is complicated, but I will give you an example why. There used to be a thing called the California lifestyle. A blue collar guy could afford an employee (this is in a one income family). A lawyer could afford to have staff, a cook, a gardener, someone for child care.

I believe you are partially right, and partially wrong.
Immigration probably did increase living standards for a period of time (mostly for higher earners), but I believe that increase may have been unsustainable. (Indeed, in another thread I argued that immigration contributed to an economic bubble)
Yes, it resulted in a temporary improvement in living standards and economic increase because the price of low-skilled labor went down, and thus prices (for many types of things) went down.
But long-term it created many other costs. Having lots of poor people in an economy consumes lots of money, in all sorts of ways. Most of these are indirect costs. (For example, hospitals have to raise their prices to deal with people who use the emergency room and can't pay. Taxes have to go up to pay for the children of poor families to go to school; in California it cost $14,000 per child per year, which is nearly half a typical middle class income after taxes)
Then we could talk about the dire shortage of affordable housing that was created from adding so many low income people, with young adults unable to afford moving out on their own. Or the poorer working class getting displaced from the lower level jobs they once did, and wages being pushed down by the competition. Most of the former working class in the state was pushed out by the 1990s.

California's time period of "economic prosperity", where you could argue that immigration may have resulted in an increase in living standards, lasted from around 1984 to 1999. By 1999, pretty much everyone was pushed to get a college degree to be able to live in a house and afford a middle class lifestyle, partially due to the rising cost of housing, but also do to companies increasingly requiring college degrees for the higher paying positions. At that period of time, it was basically used as a filter to separate the immigrants from the white people in the workforce, one could say. The prevailing idea at the time was that immigration would create more people at the bottom of the pyramid and then everyone else could get a college degree and rise higher in the pyramid. (Of course this was literally like a "pyramid scheme", not economically sustainable over more than one generation)

Even today, immigration is resulting in lower prices for less skilled labor (than in other parts of the country where there is much less immigration). However, you can also see housing prices and rent levels are very much higher in these areas, resulting in a big overall increase in the cost of living.
And younger people (including elderly persons and disabled persons) have fewer unskilled entry level job opportunities, due to competition from adult immigrants. (The easier, more desirable, or less unpleasant entry level jobs are all taken)

[late]

I believe you are partially right, and partially wrong.

In the 1960s, Blue collar guys could afford hired help. Japanese gardeners were popular.

There's a bunch of reasons why it ended. For one thing Japan had it's own economic boom.

There was a referendum in the 70s that froze property taxes. That was one of another of the reasons. Go find the rest.

It's annoying to watch you fake it, and it makes you look like a rum idiot.

[Puffer Fish]

In the 1960s, Blue collar guys could afford hired help. Japanese gardeners were popular.

Yes, but it was a pyramid scheme.
Eventually immigrants moved up into those blue collar positions.
Then blue collar positions could no longer afford hired help.

The wage gap between very low level positions and slightly higher blue collar positions narrowed.
(Probably back down to the level in much older times before the immigration started)

So that's why I say it only resulted in a TEMPORARY increase in living standards, in a certain era of time.

There's a bunch of reasons why it ended. For one thing Japan had it's own economic boom.

If we are referring specifically to Japanese immigrants, by around 2005 to 2016, living standards in California had declined to a level that many Japanese decided to return back to Japan. Why continue to live in the U.S. when housing costs in California were mostly higher than they were in Tokyo, Japan's most expensive and desirable city?
Plus Japanese were edged out by other immigrant groups. (These days most all the "Japanese" sushi restaurants are run by Koreans or Vietnamese)

[late]

Yes, but it was a pyramid scheme.

No, it wasn't.

[Puffer Fish]

No, it wasn't.

The Left always seems to think they can get something for nothing.

It's very similar to a pyramid scheme. For those who may not know, in a pyramid scheme things can continue to go on because there are always new investors entering at the bottom, pouring money into the system in the expectation that they too will be able to move up in the pyramid and get money from a new generation of investors below them in the pyramid.
But as a consequence, the pyramid has to keep growing in order to be sustainable. The base of the pyramid would have to keep growing larger for the scheme to continue.

In this case, fresh desperate new immigrants constitute the base of the pyramid. Those immigrants are only coming because they expect that themselves (and their next generation of offspring) will be able to move up in the pyramid into the working class.
Obviously this is not going to be able to provide a benefit to the blue collar working class if all those immigrants far below them start moving into their economic level.

[Godstud]

I think we all know, by now, that California is a different planet.

[late]

It's very similar to a pyramid scheme.

Diluting stupid doesn't change what it is.

[Puffer Fish]

Diluting stupid doesn't change what it is.

I could explain it to you further, but I suspect it isn't worth the effort, seeing your off-point one-line replies.

[late]

I could explain it to you further...

While I appreciate the unintentional hilarity, you could not.

Posting Victor Davis Hansen is roughly equivalent to shooting yourself in the head, and that's just for starters.

The California lifestyle happened because the devastation of WW2 motivated people to go to California. Japan was going to recover eventually, so no more Japanese gardeners...

During that era California invested heavily in infrastructure, they had the best schools, the best roads, etc. The good people decided to cap taxes, and that investment stopped. It also screwed up their politics.

While that did a lot of damage, overall, they have the problems of success. One of the things nobody mentions is that while success is great, it's going to present you with a new set of problems. There's no magic, kid. San Francisco is small, and Americans are reactionaries (for the most part). So while the Right loves to blame Progressives (or the Left), the reality is the land owners are protecting their interests even when it hurts the city. Progressive window dressing doesn't change the reality on the ground...

[wat0n]

Those landowners are also progressives and indeed are just simply voting for their pockets like most people do. The crazy, incompetent progressives ruling San Francisco are just doing what they were mandated to.

[late]

Those landowners are also progressives and indeed are just simply voting for their pockets like most people do. The crazy, incompetent progressives ruling San Francisco are just doing what they were mandated to.

You can't be Progressive and do sh*t like that.

[wat0n]

You can't be Progressive and do sh*t like that.

But in practice, they do - this article in The Atlantic about Chesa Boudin's recall in SF is quite... Interesting, this part is quite insane when you think about it:

...

Consider the story of the flower farm at 770 Woolsey Street. It slopes down 2.2 acres in the sunny southern end of the city and is filled with run-down greenhouses, the glass long shattered—a chaos of birds and wild roses. For five years, advocates fought a developer who was trying to put 63 units on that bucolic space. They wanted to sell flowers there and grow vegetables for the neighborhood—a kind of banjo-and-beehives utopian fantasy. The thing they didn’t want—at least not there, not on that pretty hill—was a big housing development. Who wants to argue against them? In San Francisco the word developer is basically a slur, close to calling someone a Republican. What kind of monster wants to bulldoze wild roses?

Decades of progressive governance in San Francisco yielded a thicket of regulations—safety reviews, environmental reviews, historical reviews, sunlight-obstruction reviews—that empower residents to essentially paralyze development. It costs only $682 to file for a discretionary review that can hold up a construction project for years, and if you’re an established club that’s been around for at least two years, it’s free. Plans for one 19-unit-development geared toward the middle class were halted this year because, among other issues raised by the neighbors, the building would have increased overall shadow coverage on Dolores Park by 0.001 percent.

The cost of real estate hit crisis levels in the 2010s, as ambitious grads from all over the world crammed into the hills to work in the booming tech industry. Soon, there was nowhere for them to live. Tech workers moved into RVs, parked alongside the poor and unhoused. Illegal dorms sprang up. Well-paid young people gentrified almost every neighborhood in town. In 2018, when London Breed was elected mayor at the age of 43, she had only just stopped living with a roommate; she couldn’t afford to live alone.

Existing homeowners, meanwhile, got very, very rich. If all other tactics fail, neighbors who oppose a big construction project can just put it on the ballot. If given a choice, who would ever vote to risk their property value going down, or say “Yes, I’m fine with a shadow over my backyard”? It doesn’t happen.

...

The article also illustrate the mess SF currently is in other aspects (the opioid crisis, homelessness, crime, education, etc). Very interesting read, and suggests voters are rethinking their worldview even if it will remain firmly within the liberal/progressive realms for the foreseeable future.

[Pants-of-dog]

The size of California's middle class has shrunk from 60% in 1970 to 52% now.

In the US overall, the middle class was 61% in 1970, amd is now 50%.

The problem seema national rather than California's.

[late]

But in practice, they do...

They are Progressive, or they are aholes...

They're aholes. It's really that simple. Putting a hooker in a nun's outfit doesn't change what she is.

[late]

The size of California's middle class has shrunk from 60% in 1970 to 52% now.

In the US overall, the middle class was 61% in 1970, and is now 50%.

The problem seems national rather than California's.

What happened is that money got sluiced into the pockets of the rich. The amount is staggering, and it is damaging the country in all kinds of ways.

[wat0n]

The size of California's middle class has shrunk from 60% in 1970 to 52% now.

In the US overall, the middle class was 61% in 1970, amd is now 50%.

The problem seema national rather than California's.

Are we using the same income thresholds here?

[Pants-of-dog]

@wat0n

Please show clearly that the income thresholds are different, that this difference is significant, and also explain and support how this difference makes the drop in CA middle class due to CA policies and not whatever caused the same drop federally.