{"id":13658,"date":"2011-07-06T20:54:11","date_gmt":"2011-07-06T20:54:11","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-07-06T21:20:56","modified_gmt":"2011-07-06T21:20:56","slug":"wsj-playing-fast-and-loose-with-the-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2011\/07\/06\/wsj-playing-fast-and-loose-with-the-facts\/","title":{"rendered":"WSJ Playing Fast and Loose with the Facts"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, John Steele Gordon decides that California has gone down the tubes<\/a>.  The article title, probably by the WSJ editors, is really the most provocative part:<\/p>\n

The Rise and Needless Decline of the Golden State<\/b>
\n
John Steele Gordon writes in The Wall Street Journal that more Americans left California than arrived in the last decade. What caused this great migration? Politics<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The bulk of the story goes through the history of California and how\/why people came here.  No real arguments there, but the last 20% goes on to attack, based primarily on anecdote and strained conclusions, that California has gone off the rails because the environmental movement is strangling the economy.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with that subtitle, it is pretty misleading, even from the title.  California hasn’t lost population, people are streaming here.  It is just that we are diversifying through immigration.  As noted in the story, our population has actually gone up by 10% over the past decade. <\/p>\n

And as for the thrust of the story, that business just hate the climate that they are streaming out of the state.  As we’ve said here many, many times, that just isn’t happening<\/a>.  Anecdotes are cute, but they aren’t data.  And anecdotes don’t tell you anything resembling the whole story.<\/p>\n

And neither does this story tell you anything resembling the whole story.  He finds somebody, somewhere who told him it was hard to get permission to do something once.  It’s oh-so-helpful and informative.<\/p>\n

But he has a small tell at what he really wants to see here: gut environmental protection and drill, baby, drill:<\/p>\n

The environmental movement was largely born in California, with John Muir and the Sierra Club, but it now threatens to strangle the state’s economy in a laoco\u00f6n of regulations. The state’s vast oil and natural gas potential on the continental shelf has been off limits for years. Environmental groups and others have become masters at tying up economic development in court.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s be honest, California still leads the nation in innovation.  California made the 90s go boom in technology, and made the last decade go boom with real estate.  Neither booms were substantially slowed by over-regulation.  And while both booms saw their inevitable crashes, neither of these busts had anything to do with regulation.  Well, except maybe under regulation.<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal likes to pretend at a fact-based reportage and hard hitting editorials.  This one eschews facts entirely in a quest to make a political point in an anti-environmentalist extravaganza.  Par for the course these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, John Steele Gordon decides that California has gone down the tubes<\/a>.  The article title, probably by the WSJ editors, is really the most provocative part:<\/p>\n

The Rise and Needless Decline of the Golden State<\/b>
\n
John Steele Gordon writes in The Wall Street Journal that more Americans left California than arrived in the last decade. What caused this great migration? Politics<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The bulk of the story goes through the history of California and how\/why people came here.  No real arguments there, but the last 20% goes on to attack, based primarily on anecdote and strained conclusions, that California has gone off the rails because the environmental movement is strangling the economy.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with that subtitle, it is pretty misleading, even from the title.  California hasn’t lost population, people are streaming here.  It is just that we are diversifying through immigration.  As noted in the story, our population has actually gone up by 10% over the past decade. <\/p>\n

And as for the thrust of the story, that business just hate the climate that they are streaming out of the state.  As we’ve said here many, many times, that just isn’t happening<\/a>.  Anecdotes are cute, but they aren’t data.  And anecdotes don’t tell you anything resembling the whole story.<\/p>\n

And neither does this story tell you anything resembling the whole story.  He finds somebody, somewhere who told him it was hard to get permission to do something once.  It’s oh-so-helpful and informative.<\/p>\n

But he has a small tell at what he really wants to see here: gut environmental protection and drill, baby, drill:<\/p>\n

The environmental movement was largely born in California, with John Muir and the Sierra Club, but it now threatens to strangle the state’s economy in a laoco\u00f6n of regulations. The state’s vast oil and natural gas potential on the continental shelf has been off limits for years. Environmental groups and others have become masters at tying up economic development in court.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s be honest, California still leads the nation in innovation.  California made the 90s go boom in technology, and made the last decade go boom with real estate.  Neither booms were substantially slowed by over-regulation.  And while both booms saw their inevitable crashes, neither of these busts had anything to do with regulation.  Well, except maybe under regulation.<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal likes to pretend at a fact-based reportage and hard hitting editorials.  This one eschews facts entirely in a quest to make a political point in an anti-environmentalist extravaganza.  Par for the course these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[7732],"class_list":["post-13658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-7732"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-3yi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}