Look at it the other way, the UK can house & feed more people with the same economic output, therefore being more efficient at those tasks.
For instance, New Zealand has the highest number of homeless people per capita. But this is only because in New Zealand, you're basically counted as homeless if you don't have a rental contract or own a house. I was technically homeless for 18 months or so, despite having a roof over my head and being perfectly happy with my living situation, I certainly didn't consider myself homeless until I read an article telling me I was. I still didn't consider myself homeless after reading the article.
Unless we know how the numbers for the UK and California are calculated, there's no point in trying to compare the numbers. Where did you source your numbers from?
I did a bit of research, and while on the face value, the numbers are correct, they aren't really correct at all. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The official number of homeless in the UK is 307,000 [1]. This includes "sleeping rough, or accommodated in temporary housing, bed and breakfast rooms, or hostels". There are only about 4,800 rough sleepers in the UK [2].
In California, there are 113,000 homeless people (2017), of which 88,000 are unsheltered, i.e. sleeping rough. [3, page 25]. HUD defines homeless differently to the UK Govt too, living in a motel or a hotel (if not paid for by the government) is not considered homeless [4]. So there's a whole category of people counted as homeless in the UK, but not the USA.
There are massively more rough sleepers in California than in the UK, even counting for the fact that the UK is much colder than CA.
Anyway, my rather long winded point is that it's difficult to compare numbers between countries, because countries have different ways of counting things.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/08/one-in-every...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
[3] https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2017-AHAR-P...
[4] https://www.nhchc.org/faq/official-definition-homelessness/
Of course, child poverty itself is no joke..
During college in Utah I was sad each winter to regularly read stories in the newspaper about homeless people found frozen to death in parks.
After President Jimmy Carter closed the mental institutions in the 70s, the mentally ill people were just let out of the asylums without any plan or further support from the state.
Since then, homelessness has grown into a ubiquitous and rampant problem throughout the United States.
Especially true in sunny California, and doubly so in San Francisco. SF seems to have become the Homeless Capital of the world. A sad and embarrassing state of affairs for a "leading" first world country.
To be clear, the amount homelessness in California is not due to lack of improvement efforts. The City of San Francisco alone pours a quarter of a billion dollars annually into services for the homeless. Despite such efforts, more than half of the homeless in the city remain unsheltered.
"1980 President Jimmy Carter signs the Mental Health Systems Act to improve on Kennedy’s dream [JFK wanted to create a network of community mental health centers where mentally ill people could live in the community while receiving care.].
1981 President Reagan repeals Carter’s legislation with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. This pushes the responsibility of mentally ill patients back to the states. The legislation creates block grants for the states, but federal spending on mental illness declines."
https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...
As far as California, specifically the bay area: it's a hell of a mess. Beyond people living on the streets, there is a growing group of people living in RVs. I took these pics near my office in Palo Alto a couple of weeks ago:
Illegally parked, but not homeless
Also: at least in Mountain View and Palo Alto, these are not all necessarily illegally parked. They need to be moved every couple of days, but at the moment, the cities aren't pressing the issue.
An American that drives relatively few miles over their life changes their life expectancy to be one of the highest in the world. It is a high impact lifestyle choice that I made a decision to adopt many years ago in part for this very reason.
I have no idea which way it is, but spinning lower GDP per worker as more efficient doesn’t make any sense to me.
Well, the GDP doesn't make any sense either. Busywork also increases the GDP.
Migration, or internal migration is probably a better term here.
It isn't just the migration either - it is the nature of what happens. The top cities/areas for several industries are here, and many secondary ones as well. Film production, software/web, lots of aerospace. It also helps that a fair bit basic needs are provided back to the state by itself (Central Valley farming).
Would be interesting to know where the wealth comes from in Colorado, Nebraska and Minnesota. I don't know enough about them to comment.
Edit: some data here: https://www.ocregister.com/2018/01/31/california-migration-c...
"The top relocation motivation for 65 percent of households arriving by van said they came to California for jobs. Only 43 percent of those departing by moving van described the move was work-related.
The jobs rush means your new neighbors are likely wealthier than the people they replaced. United’s study showed 68 percent of arriving households make $100,000 or more annually; just 63 percent of those departing by moving van make above that threshold."
Wealth in Colorado, Minnesota, etc., comes from the same place as anywhere else. The U.S. is a rich country with lots of productive industries. Tech is actually a pretty small portion of that (5-6% of GDP, 3% of employment). E.g. Target is based in Minnesota, and has double the revenues of Facebook.
How much of the GDP is based on coastline, major ports, access to imports from China/Southeast Asia that get distributed to the rest of the US, US based companies located there with manufacturing based in China and even Mexico.
Geographically, it seems like it's in an ideal location to hold business HQ's with access to less expensive labor for imported goods.
Is there a study like this out there?
You compare that to the UK that doesn't have any clearly accessible inexpensive labor force option and it makes you wonder.
Despite this, it's one of the major agricultural producers in the world due to it's variety of climate zones and long growing seasons. I'm not sure of the current status, but agriculture used to be a larger industry for the state than tech and film combined.
One might think that its geographic location would be a problem, and cross-Pacific trade isn't as big as cross-Atlantic, but it's just so large and populated as a state, and it turns out that intra-Americas trade is far dominant to either oceanic competitor. Just selling its products and services to the U.S. alone brings it enormous economic activity. But it turns out that most of what it produces also has ample foreign markets as well (tech, film, food).
Federal land by state table (numbers vary between years and by counting method - Utah federal lands have increased significantly since 2004): https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state#Fede...
California map: https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/printable/images/pdf/fed...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#Agricult...
Huh? Newport Beach is the busiest port in the world. Cross-Pacific trade dwarfs cross-Atlantic trade.
Huh? Newport Beach? If you mean the Port of Los Angeles, which is next to Long Beach, but is actually in San Pedro, you're not even close. It's not even the busiest in America.
Measured by tonnage: Busiest port in the world is Ningbo-Zhoushan, China. Busiest American port is South Louisiana (#14 worldwide).[0]
Measured by containers: Busiest port in the world is Shanghai, China. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[1]
Measured by transshipments: Busiest port in the world is Singapore. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[2]
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_ports_by_cargo...
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_transshipment_...
I also overstated the domain. I should have confined the claim to the country, not the world. And as others have pointed out, even at a national level, the claim is disputable.
> "California has a labor force of 19.3 million compared to the labor force in the UK of 33.8 million (World Bank data here). Amazingly, it required a labor force 75% larger (and 14.5 million more people) in the UK to produce the same economic output last year as California! ... Further, California as a separate country would have been the 5th largest economy in the world last year, ahead of the UK ($2.62 trillion), India ($2.61 trillion) and France ($2.58 trillion)."