
Nate Silver writes at his 538 site on a topic close to my boyhood heart: How, when Dodger Steve Yeager homered off Yankee Ron Guidry to turn the tide in the 1981 World Series, indeed as late as mid-August 1982, it seemed not implausible that my native Los Angeles would someday overtake New York.
When the Los Angeles Kings and New York Rangers meet Wednesday for Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final, it will be the first time since 1981 that teams with “Los Angeles” and “New York” in their names have vied for a major sports championship. That year, the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees in the World Series, avenging losses in 1977 and 1978.
But it was for entirely different reasons that Los Angeles seemed ascendant in 1981. The 1970s had been a horrendous decade for New York, marked by a near-bankruptcy, a daylong blackout and a crime epidemic. …
It might even have been possible to imagine Los Angeles overtaking New York as the United States’ preeminent economic city. The Los Angeles Times, in 1985, ran an article based on Commerce Department projections which said that Los Angeles would become more populous than New York by 2000. That particular claim was based on an odd definition of metro areas that included most of Los Angeles’s suburbs but few of New York’s. Nevertheless, had the entire Los Angeles and New York metro areas (as according to the Census Bureau’s definitions) maintained the income-growth rates that they did during the 1970s, LA would have seen its income become larger than New York’s at some point during the mid-2000s.
On August 12, 1982, the Dow Jones Average closed below 777. Wall Street was dead in the water. I was in Manhattan at the time looking for a job. A friend from MBA school who had started a couple of months earlier at one of the two top investment banks called me up and said he’d been telling his bosses about me and they wanted me to come in for a job interview. But who wanted to work on Wall Street? So, I blew off the opportunity. A few days later, Volcker cut interest rates, stocks and bonds jumped, and 32 years later, here we are. (Did I mention my panhandling drive?)
So here’s Silver’s graph of what actually happened:

By the way, I suspect that Silver’s new project is disappointing many of his NYT-era fans who want him to be a fire-breathing partisan. Instead, he’s a numbers nerd who likes coming up with questions to investigate that seem pretty cool to me and a few score other people, but not to the red meat masses who followed him in 2012. Thus, the comments on fivethirtyeight.com articles tend to be intelligent but few.
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Whatever the myriad reasons for New York’s rise and LA’s relative fall, the one thing we know, as sure as the sky is blue, is that demographics had NOTHING to do with it because RACISM.
I see Silver uses Facebook for comments. That’s a pretty good way to squelch commenting.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/when-la-was-poised-to-beat-nyc/#comment-563980
Poor shlub, I hope the data nerds at 538 keep going.
I do get why you’re so eager to ruin NYC though–LA patriotism (municipalism?). A sound conservative principle, actually–National Review argued that the NYT’s enthusiasm about the Boston Red Sox showed they were liberals, as a conservative should be loyal to his town and country.
I was born on the Upper West Side, so:
Is it possible Silicon Valley and San Francisco sucked the life out of LA? Back in the pre Microsoft and tech 70s and 80s when New York City was called the hole in the doughnut upstate New York (Kodak, Xerox(*), IBM, and even Westinghouse and GE) were actually doing very well. From the names given you can see what happened to upstate. So maybe LA lost its growth story to other places in Cali.
Another possibility is that the pension crisis just hit LA sooner than New York ( which just recently recovered from the financial crisis of the 70s) . These days most NYC police are collecting retirement income. At some point there will be another financial crisis, maybe you will read articles about what NYC can learn from LA about a pensions crisis.
Or maybe California has hit peak water?
This being a Steve Sailer piece, the message is at least in part that NYC gentrified at the same time that LA went full 3rd World. But the post-Cold War “peace dividend” also hit LA hard.
The U.S. is different than most coutries in that its largest cities are on the coasts. In many countries the main cities are inland, in the agricultural heartlands, and are usually transportation hubs. Paris, Moscow, Warsaw, Vienna, Beijing and to some extant even London are all inland. Coastal cities are usually port towns with a reputation for seediness – Liverpool, Hamburg, Shanghai, Marseille for example. If we followed the norm, the rivalry would be between Chicago and St. Louis, with Cincinnati following along. Of course, this norm is not true in countries that are all coast, like Japan or Norway.
Steve already mentioned the Wall St. boom. There is also the unrelated phenomenon of gentrification, which is the return of elites to cities. You know how all the important people fled the cities for rustic villas and castles during the Dark Ages and then started coming back to cities during the Renaissance? For whatever reason (definitely not an upswing in culture) elites are now coming back to cities again. LA isn’t a city.
The LA Times article was probably a little over exuberance on the part of Los Angelenos written at the point they had overtaken Chicago in population.
Like strnbrg, my first thought was the recession of the early 90s, which hit California, and LA in particular, very hard. And a lot of middle class jobs left the area that were never replaced.
New York has lots of millionaires, but it’s not a fun place for the middle class, is it?
Well, the elites are probably coming back to densely-populated cities because crime has gone down. Urban living became safer. As social animals people tend to like each other’s company. Bar scenes, etc. Both during the Dark Ages and the initial stage of multi-culti upscale people were pushed out of cities by violence. They would have preferred to stay. Which they demonstrated by returning as soon as the violence decreased.
The answer is immigration. LA got a TIDAL WAVE of poor, wealth-destroying Mexican Immigrants and while NYC had plenty of immigrants, there were less of them and less concentrated of poor Mexicans.
NYC also had a lot of foreign wealth buying into the place, as various oligarchs and the like sought to shelter wealth. True, NYC has plenty of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, but less than the Mexican onslaught.
LA has more Mexican Nationals than any city save Mexico City.
What this did was create: crushing traffic, with few new freeways/roads able to be built (the place is already covered in concrete); a massive welfare/schooling burden, with massive outlays for schools and welfare to serve a population unable to pay for it (unlike LA’s golden age of the 1950s and 1960s). You also had massive White flight, out to peripheral places like Temecula, Simi Valley, the far reaches of the San Fernando Valley, to get away from the Mexican tidal wave of immigration which tended to depress wealth: money was saved to buy a new place farther away which cost more to commute to/from jobs in the core LA Metro area.
As to the question of SF vs. LA in tech development, SF has by virtue of geography, much less of the tidal wave of Mexican Immigration. It is farther from the border, the peninsula has limited places to have say, four families in one house, etc. The very “Whiteness” of SF meant it was a incubator for White people taking fairly big risks — the White background meant networking and such was much easier than in LA.
Yes, Stanford. I’ll raise you USC and UCLA. Yes nice weather. I’ll raise you Santa Monica and Hermosa Beach.
But the entire LA Metro area became basically a massive out-suburb of Mexico City. A place dominated by Mexicans and thus featuring the wealth and development of Mexico. This should surprise no one.
[Somewhat related, Seattle passed a min wage law of $15 an hour. The "real" reason for this is to price out cheap Mexican labor and keep the place White and Asian. If you have to pay, say $15 (it was $25 in the failed Swiss min wage initiative) for unskilled labor, that labor better be smart, hustling, and effective. Which leaves out most NAMS, and you don't have Chipotle -- famous for hiring nearly all illegals -- importing entire Mexican villages as a cheap disposable labor force. Seattle's Whites may love diversity in Red State enclaves, as a way to stick it to Whites who they want to destroy in every way, because of cultural differences. But among their own, they want to keep their place as White/Asian as possible.]
Ah, yes, the “peace dividend!” Funny, I cannot recall getting my “dividend” check for the past dozen years or so…!?!?!
Test
@Dahinda
Actually Shanghai was, even around 1920, the Paris of the East (although Saigon tried to claim the title; Saigon is also kind of coastal).
Big cities have their share of slums in any given time but Shanghai was, after Tokyo, the most advanced city in Asia and it is actually better now.
My all time favorite bumper sticker was one I saw in N. Calif. around 1978 back when we were being overrun with obnoxious New Yorkers. It had a picture of an apple core with the caption, “I don’t care if you are from New York and I don’t care what you did there”.
Yes peace dividend aka aerospace cutbacks gutted the White SoCal middle class. But also think Diversity and trust. SF reaped the dotcom boom bc non diverse it had more trust just as Put am describes. Ultra diverse LA has low trust. Ask Reginal Denny.
“But among their own, they want to keep their place as White/Asian as possible.”
If that’s the case, why did the Mexicanize LA? It used to be white too once.
@Colmainen, I did regret afterward throwing Shanghai into the list but there is no edit button here! My comment is not a hard rule but just a generalization. Most countries in history had their primary cities in their agricultural heartlands.
No matter how one dices or slices it, entertainment industry has to sell stuff to make a profit.
Wall Street, in contrast, can pull all sorts of tricks to rake in tons of dough. And Wall Street is a lot closer to Washington Politicians of both parties.
Los Angeles got too many Mexicans.
NYC even has the Tonight Show now.