Are you pushing some kind of California versus Texas argument, or what?
What is your point, Texas is Texas because of some oil boom?
My point is that CA is way ahead of TX when it comes to the portion of its economy that is cutting edge and doesn't come out of the ground. That may eventually change, but we're not there yet. CA wasn't always ahead of TX. As recently as 1930, TX had a bigger population than CA. TX's vs CA's population history:
| Historical population | |||
| Census | TX | CA | TX/CA |
| 1850 | 212,592 | 92,597 | 230% |
| 1860 | 604,215 | 379,994 | 159% |
| 1870 | 818,579 | 560,247 | 146% |
| 1880 | 1,591,749 | 864,694 | 184% |
| 1890 | 2,235,527 | 1,213,398 | 184% |
| 1900 | 3,048,710 | 1,485,053 | 205% |
| 1910 | 3,896,542 | 2,377,549 | 164% |
| 1920 | 4,663,228 | 3,426,861 | 136% |
| 1930 | 5,824,715 | 5,677,251 | 103% |
| 1940 | 6,414,824 | 6,907,387 | 93% |
| 1950 | 7,711,194 | 10,586,223 | 73% |
| 1960 | 9,579,677 | 15,717,204 | 61% |
| 1970 | 11,196,730 | 19,953,134 | 56% |
| 1980 | 14,229,191 | 23,667,902 | 60% |
| 1990 | 16,986,510 | 29,760,021 | 57% |
| 2000 | 20,851,820 | 33,871,648 | 62% |
| 2010 | 25,145,561 | 37,253,956 | 67% |
| Est. 2013 | 26,448,193 | 38,340,000 | 69% |
If I had to guess, I'd say that rise of Hollywood brought large numbers of people to CA to find all those places they had only seen in the movie house. The Dust Bowl brought large numbers of Okies to CA. WWII accentuated this move as GI's coming home from the Pacific Theater decided they liked CA's perennial sunshine and moderate climate more than the weather extremes of their home states.