There are fewer jobs, poorer jobs, weaker companies, etc. Notice Cox has picked two comparison periods before the onset of the Great Recession. His point is to show that California was on the wrong track before the recession began, a set of bad trends only accelerated by the recession.
Making reference to Steven Malanga's Cali to Business: Get Out, Cox summarizes California's economic problems as the following:
Suffocating regulations, inflated business taxes and fees, a lawsuit-friendly legal environment, and a political class uninterested in business concerns, if not downright hostile to them.
He adds to that an extraordinarily high cost of living, with housing prices having skyrocketed in the major metropolitan areas thanks to runaway land-use regulation.
Cox doesn't even mention the state's sky high personal income and sales taxes. Or the domination of state politics by public employee unions.
