George Rebane
A reader and correspondent sent me the following article – ‘A Shocking Number of Californians Are Moving to Texas Unless You Do Basic Math’. Therein the author cites data and analysis from a market data firm Placer.ai which sidesteps the long-running and well-established California exodus phenomenon, focuses on the California-to-Texas migration, and erroneously concludes that there is nothing unexpected about the numbers that Placer has collected. To wit –
The logic here is very simple. Some people move between states every year for normal life reasons. That’s good and normal and not cause for alarm. And California has the most people of any state. Therefore, all things equal, we’d expect lots of people from California to be moving to Texas. In fact, we would expect that more people from California would be moving to Texas than from any other state, again, because California has the most people. This would not in itself imply anything is wrong with California or great about Texas. It would simply mean people are doing what we would expect them to do. The only way this particular data point would suggest something is indeed amiss is if a disproportionate number of new Texans came from California relative to California’s population.
That may sound confusing, but doing some quick math makes it all very clear. The population of the United States minus Texas—because people already in Texas cannot move to Texas—is 300.86 million people. California’s population is 39.35 million, or 13 percent of the U.S.’ non-Texas population. Therefore, more than 13 percent of Texas’ new residents would have to be Californians in order for there to be something of note going on here.
But that’s not the case. According to Placer.ai, which uses “foot traffic data” gleaned by tracking people's phones, 11.1 percent of new Texans from July 2019 and July 2022 are from California. That’s actually slightly less than one would expect based on an even distribution. If anything, the pertinent question from Placer.ai’s data is: Why are so few Californians moving to Texas?
The main flaw in the argument here is that people move randomly between states with ingress and egress rates proportional to source and target populations. This is a gross error in the current situation where most of migrating Americans are motivated by economic (taxes, regulations) and socio-political (crime, education) reasons. For example, Texas receives many new residents from so-called shithole cities in states like New York, Illinois, New Jersey, in addition to California. Such movements can invalidate any arguments based on randomness. For example, California’s lower percentage of “new Texans” can be completely explained away by the greater number of the state’s immigrants arriving from the other escape-worthy states that need have no relationship to population proportions, and greater numbers of Californians moving to other states such as Idaho, Wyoming, and Florida.
Bloomberg reports, “The long-term migration out of California accelerated during the Covid-19 crisis, with Texas, Washington and Florida as top destinations for people moving out of the state, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.” (here) The LA Times continues its ongoing reports of the exodus with ‘California Exodus Continues: LA, San Francisco lead the way’.
Liberals across the land are desperate to refute the mass migrations out of the major shithole regions that Democratic administrations have created since the launch of Great Society programs. This gives rise to a number of loudly argued but logically weak pieces that appear in various lamestream outlets. The fundamental reality is that California continues to create conditions that drive out large numbers of its wealth-generating workers and businesses. This is apparent from all types of correctly analyzed data starting with what we learn from the Dept of Commerce (Census Bureau) and going all the way down to California’s historic first-time reduction in the number of representatives we send to Congress.
‘The Real Threat to Our Republic’ (updated 12sep22)
George Rebane
Over the years I’ve touched on the impact that the ‘educated’ liberal woman have had on our society and our republic. My own experience with such people has been uniformly informative and corroborated by many readings on the subject. I’ve been meaning to write a definitive piece on these females who pervade our big cities and suburban communities, and now Jack Cashill at the American Thinker has beat me to it with his excellent essay, ‘Why ‘Educated’ Liberal Women Are the Real Threat to Our Republic’. Along the way he coined ELF as the efficient acronym for future reference.
Through my many years I have had the opportunity to take the measure of ELFs in divers social and professional situations. They all share a set of common characteristics which start with a collectivist ideology expressed through fewer than 50 tried-and-true leftwing shibboleths and slogans, an ideology which they can neither dissect nor defend, and which is sustained on a solid foundation of unwarranted hubris held together by generous dollops of ignorance and one-sided mis/disinformation.
These are the women who will proudly vote Democrat regardless of soaring inflation, rising gas prices, rampant crime in the streets, the unchecked flood of illegal aliens, and oppressive COVID policies that have irreparably damaged all children, the poor most notably.
Institutionally, they have co-opted formerly non-partisan organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women. Additionally, in academe they have been stalwart foot soldiers in both pedagogy and administration to turn our public schools and institutions of higher learning into critical-thinking-free zones operating under the façade of ‘education’.
At the core of the ELFs' (intellectual) vulnerability is their ignorance, if not at the top, certainly among the masses. This should not surprise. Everywhere and always, men have performed better on political knowledge tests than women (just as conservatives routinely outperform liberals and independents). Researchers exploring this particular gender gap long ago gave up on questioning whether this was true and have focused instead on why.
When ELFs vote, they vote as a homogeneous block. The DNC and Democratic leadership have long been painfully aware of this, and the fact that they only trust and get their news from the lamestream media and social media sites.
Jack Cashill expands on all these points, citing many studies that corroborate the above characterization of ELFs and the institutions under their influence. We can put a bow on it for now by also recognizing the current thrust of the Democrats’ divisive pre-election rhetoric, especially Biden’s Philadelphia speech that could not have been better staged by Joseph Göbbels himself.
In November, Biden needs the ELFs to vote en masse. This will happen only if they remain ignorant of the things that should worry them — the border, crime, inflation — and scared silly of things that need not. Something tells me that the producers of Biden's Nuremberg-style spectacle knew what they were doing.
Incapable of giving it further thought, the ELFs will confidently vote us into the kind of American autocracy that the socialist wing of the Democratic Party has been planning for decades.
[12sep22 update] Victor Davis Hanson’s recent essay ‘American Delira’ puts the above threat to our country in its greater and proper context. In recent years such essays have appeared regularly, not only from his pen, but also from other astute observers of the American saga. Nevertheless, VDH has a unique gift of being able to wordsmith a comprehensive description and analysis of what has brought us here and what we are doing now to undo ourselves. A hat tip to one of our regular commenters who has also regularly been the first to alert RR readers to the timely contributions of VDH and others.
Posted at 11:29 AM in Critical Thinking & Numeracy, Culture Comments, Current Affairs, Our Country, The Liberal Mind, We the iSheeple | Permalink | Comments (24)
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