The California Bear Awakens

Fueled by trade, technology and individual initiative, the state is returning to its once and future good-news self. As the clock ticks down on 1995, may I be the first to proffer a premature Oscar nomination? To the great state of California, in the category of comeback performer of the year.

Do you think I’m just being boosterish? Listen to the London-based Economist magazine, in a story titled “California Roars Back” (the East Coast media aren’t quite there yet): “The script was not supposed to read like this. The precipitous drop in America’s defense spending in the late 1980s was supposed to leave California prostrate well into the next century, if not longer. But now, confounding the critics, California is back.”

California has now replaced every one of the half-million or so jobs it lost during the 1990-93 recession and has made up for all of the aerospace positions the state lost during the defense build-down. Who would have thunk it? And, if you’re into hope--after these difficult recent years, who isn’t?--reflect that the California recovery is built not on waxing surfboards or flipping burgers or threading boardwalk prayer beads. It’s built on booming foreign trade, energized by the geographic destiny of our proximity to the Pacific Rim. California now rakes in 25% of the nation’s international trade. Air traffic into Los Angeles County, much of it from Pacific Rim and Latin nations, grew more than 6% last year.

Tourism and entertainment are back after the 1992 urban riots; soaring, too, is the professional services sector--no, you dirty minds, not the kinky Heidi Fleiss stuff (though that’s probably soaring, too) but engineering, financial and computer services whose fees to clients reflect the upper end of the market. And then there is our world-leading technology sector, especially vibrant in the northern part of the state where Software Is Them. Even our long-sagging housing sector is waking up: Housing prices could rise more than 3% statewide next year.

For this comeback performance of the year, I’d like to thank a number of people and factors. First, let us praise Californians: During the recession you didn’t just sit there and wait to catch the next wave. Our oft-parodied culture of individuality in fact stimulates a dynamic economy of small-to-tiny businesses that crystallize into a sort of economic safety net when big businesses like aerospace run into trouble. Consider us as one of the greatest playgrounds of invention in history: Our entertainment industry is as much (if not more) a myriad of little jobs and small contractors as the big studio stuff. And it is now overall a bigger employer than the state’s entire defense sector.

Let’s also thank all those who fought in the business climate reform movement. To some, California was once infamous for being about as inviting to business as communist Bulgaria. We still have to work on this, but at least we have put a stake in the heart of the most obnoxious impediment--the notorious workers’ compensation system that was piling unnecessary costs on all businesses and crushing small ones. Now such costs have been reduced 40%. Red tape has been sliced somewhat, too. The oft-knocked state Legislature and oft-knocked Gov. Pete Wilson deserve credit for this.

Others to thank include the improved national economy and, let us not forget, the Clinton administration, which scrambled onto the first jetliners out of Washington after last year’s devastating Northridge quake. Officials came bearing bushels of financial aid that helped jump-start the shaky local economy. Thank you.

We’ve still got a long way to go, of course. We have to figure out a way to improve our state infrastructure, which we are permitting to become economically inefficient, and our human and race relations. Not to mention our public schools, colleges and universities, whose prospects will have a substantial impact on California’s future IQ. We have the biggest classes in the nation but rank near the bottom in per-student spending. That’s incredible. How can there be enough money for prisons but not for schools? We can’t choose between them; we need both.

You know, an Oscar is really the least we deserve, but let’s keep our acceptance speech short anyway. In the past few years California has had to endure urban riots, fires, floods, the worst recession since the Great Depression, a major earthquake and a seemingly endless celebrity criminal trial. Now, as things are starting to look up, it occurs to me that we may have to overcome yet another serious threat to our composure: a plague of good news.

Are we up to the challenge? Can we handle it?

I say I’m ready: Let’s give it a shot.

Tom Plate’s column runs Tuesdays. His e-mail address is tplate@ucla.edu