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Not only that but as another user pointed out, it’s a super wealthy state. I think the second or third wealthiest in the country? It doesn’t really have much in common with Texas. So the numbers here don’t surprise me.
Being an already wealthy state makes it harder to have fast economic growth because compositional growth is more difficult.
In say Florida or SC you can see growth with few net new jobs by replacing a hospitality worker with a Tech worker or a server with a Pharma worker. (This is how the early Soviet Union and post communist China hit gangbusters GDP growth) there is little growth in employment in Mass it’s hard for GDP to grow since there is less compositional optimization to happen.
But certain industries benefitted from the last couple years, namely Big Pharma and Big Tech. In that light, I think Boston and Silicon Valley being overall winners in the GDP game is to be expected.
Texas seems to have a lot of babies being born comparatively especially to Florida. So that might explain some of the disparities. Also small city Florida does significantly better than small city Texas from a growth perspective and that’s still a substantial part of the population outside of the big 4 cities in Florida and Texas.
This is kind of what throws me off Economic growth in Massachusetts is on par or better than most sunbelt states (sans FL). It’s housing market remains robust and we are suppose to believe the population is declining?
Seems like the numbers conflict
The problem with that is that you seem to be conflating GDP with job/population growth. You can easily have growing GDP and declining population (you see this in a lot of "Rust Belt" cities, because rise in value of economic productivity in many cases more than offsets the decline in population/workforce).
In other words, economic growth (as measured by economic value, which is what GDP is, not jobs) has long been de-coupling from population growth, especially within ever-increasing automation and "technifying" of industries.
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