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Comment by blahedo | Hacker News Reader

Summary: Texas is better at education than California.

My response: They're sure as hell better in technical areas. Texas has put a lot of money and effort into funding and licensing STEM teachers at the secondary level (and maybe earlier). At the AP CS exam reading every year, Texas is always very well represented, and I'm always a little jealous of the level of support they get just in terms of state standards and that kind of thing. (Another state you might not expect is Georgia, actually. The state universities there have done a lot to raise awareness in their feeder schools---i.e. the high schools in the state---of the importance of computation and CS.)

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Yet, California has ~14% higher per capita GDP for some reason (Edit: Climate, location, etc). So Texas spends more of its GDP per person on education because California only spends an extra 12% on education.

PS: What's with the down vote the article talks about each states GDP for a reason, but ignores that difference when comparing education spending. Areas with higher GDP have higher costs as well. People love to dump on California but it's got a higher than average GDP compared to the rest of the USA so it's not completely broken.

If it were a closed system (walled borders), that might be more true. However, judging a state as "doing well based on GDP", when it happens to have Hollywood, Napa Valley, Silicon Valley, and La Jolla, I think would be ignoring immigrants to California and geographical luck too much.

In other words. There's good chance, if you're a wealthy Californian, you're an immigrant to California, or you're exploiting it's geographical assets (coast, sunshine, soil). To give the credit to the state government or the school system for those things seems a bit generous.

True, but I don't think you can cleanly separate government from GDP. You see a lot more cops in rich areas than poor ones even though they have less crime. The higher someone’s disposable income the more they care about clean air etc. Which is why economic growth as a political message tends to play better in poor areas than rich ones. And why rich areas seem to have a "wasteful" government. However, when the local populace wants to have X then calling the government wasteful for providing X seems to miss a core idea, IMO.

PS: I was not implying that the government was the reason why they had a higher GDP just that was higher for some reason.

I agree that it is easy to miss the power of immigration.

However it is also easy to miss the power of key laws whose influence is so pervasive that nobody even thinks about them. For instance take Silicon Valley. I firmly believe that one of the reasons that took off in California is that California law says that anything you do on your own time with your own equipment is yours. Period. And no, you can't sign that away.

This makes it extremely difficult to contest an employee who gets a startup going then leaves to further their startup. Which stops legal challenges that otherwise would kill the Silicon Valley startup culture.

I am not a lawyer, but my belief is that Texas law is the same as the default in most of the USA - if you are a professional employee with the wrong contract then work you do on your own time with your own equipment that relates to the skills you are hired for belong to your employee. I personally know people in other states who tried the whole "start a startup, then leave you job for it" thing under regulations like that who were flat out told, "You can quit if you want but everything that you've done for that startup belongs to us." Not a fun situation.

That fact is one of the reasons why I, personally, choose to live in California.

So yes, luck. But yes, state law as well.

People love to dump on California's governance, along with other issues. I don't think anyone can deny that Hollywood and Silicon Valley are economic powerhouses.

True, but Hollywood has lost the dominance it had 30 years ago. Orlando, Vancouver, and a handful of other places are often chosen due to the costs and regulations that a Hollywood production now entails.

> People love to dump on California but it's got a higher than average GDP compared to the rest of the USA so it's not completely broken.

A higher GDP isn't worth much if you consume it to produce it.

Per the Gov's "state of the state" speech, California spends more on prisons than education. That can't be a recipe for success.

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