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.
rebanesruminations.com 
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