Yeah, but, just look at that chart! California isn't shaped any differently than anyone else. It's always been somewhat higher on this metric, it was before the pandemic and it is now. But you'd absolutely not look at that chart with fresh eyes and flag it as an outlier. At all. It's doing what the rest of the labor market is doing. Really no state is particularly weird, which is about what you'd expect for a very fluid intra-national labor force.
California is an outlier in most ways viz-a-viz the US.
Population is ~40M, which is more than Canada (~38M) or Australia (~28M). If California was an independent country it would be something like the 9th largest economy in the world. It's a massively productive farming region on top of having the high-end of US technology, and has other national or international-tier industries like Hollywood.
If I want a barometer for the US, tell me how Ohio is doing.
The counties you named as part of the "above average outlier" account for nearly half the population of the state, so I'm not sure that's really, for California, an "outlier" region.
The visualization also excludes the middle (that is, there is no color band centered on the middle, everything is forced into "below" or "above" average); if you view it as "most of the state outside the central/north coast is around the national average, and the central/north coast and a small part of the interior is notably below that" its not really all that surprising of a result.
California's a big economy. But it's not (at least superficially) outsized relative to other parts of the United States that contain similar populations.
It's really not, any more than any other than other geographically contiguous region with an 1/8 the population of the country is. I mean, sure, each part is different from the whole, but California isn't unusually different.
Your statistics are a decade old - in the meantime California continued to climb, there's updated numbers. The fact that a state that huge is competitive in GDP per capita with extremely tiny flyover states, is extremely telling.
California's a big economy. But it's not (at least superficially) outsized relative to other parts of the United States that contain similar populations.
CA recently is in a wave; the color from the linked page is about the new cases / capita in the last 7 days. Overall CA is doing better than the median state.
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