California Needs Lonzo, Not Lebron

Go home to Ohio, LeBron James. Yes, I’m happy to see the world’s greatest basketball player join my favorite team, the Los Angeles Lakers. But as a Californian, I fear LeBron is the last thing our state needs.

His arrival is a high-profile symptom of one of our state’s big problems: California favors older, wealthier outsiders over our younger, homegrown compatriots. Comparing LeBron to his new teammate, guard Lonzo Ball, demonstrates the problem.

Lebron, 33, just received a $154 million, four-year contract to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and revive the Lakers. As a free agent mercenary, he has company. A Stanford study shows that, despite high taxes, the Golden State attracts more millionaires than it loses. The trend holds among the upper-middle-class. People who move to California have more education and income ($110,000 annually or more) than the average Californian.

But California has been struggling to develop and retain younger homegrown people like Lonzo Ball, a 20-year-old from the Inland Empire. California has seen net outflows of its younger people — especially those who make less than $55,000 a year, don’t have college degrees (like Lonzo, who attended UCLA for a year), or want to start families — to states like Texas and Arizona.

Lonzo, too, may be on his way out; the sports media say he could be traded for older, proven players whom LeBron prefers.

This makes sense in 2018, when LeBron is far superior to Lonzo. But in the long term, LeBron’s value to the Lakers could be less than Lonzo’s.

LeBron, at age 33, is old for a pro athlete, and could be injured and in decline when his contract expires in 2022. In contrast, if Lonzo realizes his potential to be a future star, he could win games for the Lakers into the 2030s.

Here, I’ll leave the basketball debate to sports experts. But in the larger context of California’s future, the Lonzos are indisputably more important than the LeBrons.

That’s because so many more of us are Lonzos.

This Lonzo-ization of California represents a sea change. From the Gold Rush until 2010, we were mostly a state of LeBrons — people who migrated here from another state or country. As a state, we were like the Lakers, traditionally a franchise dependent on free agents from elsewhere, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal.

But in this decade, after a steep fall in immigration, we’ve become a state of Lonzos.

Now, more than 54 percent of Californians were born and raised here. Lonzo’s rising generation of millennials is projected to be our first generation that is majority homegrown. With this shift, California needs to develop and educate its own future citizens, instead of relying on people from someplace else. In other words, we desperately need our Lonzos to succeed. Too many haven’t.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.