Over at AT&T Savings—a retail blog associated with the telecom giant AT&T—there’s some potentially alarming Google trend data suggesting that more and more Californians might be eyeing the exit doors.
Last week, blogger Cara Fuller examined the most popular Google searches phrased in the form of a “Should I?” question and then ranked common queries in each state.
“Using Google autocomplete, we looked at over 100 of the most popular Google search,” writes Fuller. “From there, we found the most distinct search for every state using Google trends data from the past year.”
The most commonly Googled “Should I?” query for Californians in 2018 was “Should I move out?”
Fuller concluded this was also the most common query in other states like Utah, Colorado, South Carolina, and Hawaii.
Residents of other states are taking to Google to ponder questions like, “Should I buy Bitcon?” (Nevada, Rhode Island, New Hampshire) and “Should I vote?” (Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, both Dakotas, Vermont, and Delaware).
But relocation is apparently the golden state of mind these days.
People have pondered the possibility of a great California exodus for almost as long as the state’s been around, but all told it probably doesn’t pay to make too much out of Fuller’s Google goods, for a few reasons:
- The search terms are ambiguous; “Should I move out?” could refer to leaving the state entirely but might also refer to any other sort of relocation. Also, the Google queries, while interesting, are not the most robust indicator to begin with, as most people take to search engines with idle queries all the time.
- As with real estate site Redfin’s regular “migration reports,” interest in moving does not always translate into actual doing it. Of course, a spike in moving-related searches is certainly not insignificant—it tells us what’s on people’s minds, which is always a critical variable. But it’s not very tangible.
- As the San Francisco Chronicle points out, both the state of California and the U.S. Census show that San Francisco’s net migration between 2006 and 2016 was about minus 1 million to 6 million, while only about 5 million moved into the state. However, census data also reveals that California’s population is rising, because state-to-state migration patterns don’t account for the number of overseas immigrants coming into California and particularly the Bay Area, which more than make up the difference.
- Cliche though it may be, research shows that the grass really is always greener on the other side; a 1998 study in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science titled “Does Living In California Make People Happy?” revealed that Midwesterners and Californians actually had roughly the same “overall self-reported life satisfaction” but that people often just assume sans evidence that life will be better someplace else.
As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman commented in a 2015 video while referring to the aforementioned 1998 study, people’s emotional happiness is not necessarily the same as their emotional satisfaction when they think about their lives in the abstract.
“We know now these two are really quite different,” says Kahneman.
Still, while Google data does not tell us much about whether people are really leaving, it does reveal an additional facet of statewide morale; regardless of whether people stay or go, multiple surveys confirm that Californians do seem to like speculating about departure.
- Your State’s Most Googled Questions [A&TT Savings]
- Californian’s Googling Should I Move? [SF Chronicle]
- San Franciscans Shopping For Homes Elsewhere [Curbed SF]
- California Population Rising [Curbed SF]
- Will Moving To California Make Me Happy? [Psychological Science]
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