“Don’t lose sight,” is the message The Economist wants Californians to come away with.
Despite heavy criticism from the likes of Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal recently regarding our foreclosure epidemic, unemployment rate, and political dysfunction (it always takes too long to approve a state budget), we have the underlying talent for restless experimentation and innovation to recover, and do so quickly.
first tuesday take: Slammed by all the negative facts about California job losses, our shrinking real estate industry, home foreclosures, and politics, it’s easy to lose heart over our prospects for the future. Yet none of these conditions directly affect most Californians. As the Inland Empire economist states in the article, “California is made up of people who don’t know what it is they are not supposed to do.” Part of that is the talent of creative destruction which brings forth better and stronger conditions than those torn down, a re-creation that is well underway as we write.
California has a maddeningly effective environment for reestablishing its position in the national and world economies. Small businesses are the business of California. We are quick to implement new ideas efficiently, and thus keep the better educated, skilled, and youthful population from migrating.
We are in no way a one-horse town dominated by a single or a few large businesses; we are flexible at all levels of society and business, the dynamics of cottage industries. New York is the only parallel to California in the U.S., both having driven big business away long ago.
Californians broker the world’s goods and services, as well as less mobile items such as real estate for which we have the world’s greatest geography—temperate with extreme topographic variety.
So take heart about your future. You are the gatekeepers to entry into real estate ownership. You are the brokers and agents who we see as having already tapped into that creative and innovative spirit, thinking up new ways to generate business. Spread the word.
Re: “Under the tarnish, still golden” from The Economist
