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Stare deep into the eye of creativity |
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A Brief History of the California Economy
From the Gold Rush days to the explosive growth of the Internet at the beginning of the 21st century, California's economic history has been one of constant change, growth and prosperity and most recently, a leader in the development of Website Design. Starting as a sparsely populated Western frontier with fewer than 100,000 residents in 1850, California's population now exceeds 34 million. From an economy that was too small to measure before the Gold Rush, California is now the eighth ranking economy in the world, about the size of Mainland China, and larger than Brazil, Canada or Spain. California's gross product exceeded the trillion-dollar mark in 1997, the first state to achieve this record. Last year, California was the first state to top $1 trillion in personal income.
Beyond size, California is also a world technological and economic leader. California is an example of what the future has in store for the rest of the nation. California has been the birthplace of many of the world's most significant technological innovations, social trends, and is a model of economic innovation and prosperity. As this new century begins, there are few economies better suited to this new "information age" than California's.
California possesses a vibrant and diverse industrial tapestry. Historically, California's remoteness from the industrial states of the East and Midwest caused California, from the beginning, to develop a fairly complex economy, rather than one devoted to a few specialized industries. Over time, new industries were introduced that, rather than displacing established industries, were simply added to the existing base, which heightened its complexity. This pattern of adding rather than displacing industries gives California its rich economic texture in which long-established industries, such as agriculture and mineral extraction, thrive alongside emerging industries, such as biotechnology, telecommunications and the Internet and Website Design. Thus, from its frontier beginnings, California has become the largest and most diverse economy in the nation.