Column: The Hoover Institution says all recent California job growth has been in government jobs. That’s completely wrong

The Hoover Institution’s landmark tower looms over the Stanford University campus, but its intellectual output is often an embarrassment. “California’s Businesses Stop Hiring,” was the headline on the report published by the conservative Hoover Institution. The original article, by UCLA economics professor Lee Ohanian, a Hoover Institution senior fellow, asserted that California added only 156,000 nonfarm jobs in the January 2022-June 2024 period. Mea culpa.” In a corrective article posted Tuesday on the Hoover website, Ohanian makes public his mea culpa but also reiterates a point he made in the original article, which is that California’s job growth is weakening. But to suggest that there’s something fundamentally faulty about policies that still undergird the most powerful state economy in the nation or that California is a “failing state” — that’s “interesting, if true”.