Notwithstanding the dismissal of California's business friendliness in the Chief Executive survey, the state's economic growth outstrips the four states at the top of the magazine's rankings.

From the end of the last recession through 2019, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, California's economy grew 34.4%, Florida's by 23.2%, Tennessee's by 18.9% and North Carolina's by 16.7%. The only one of the four to keep pace with California in that time span was Texas, at 34.0%.

This isn't to praise California's governance -- the state's inability to address its dearth of affordable housing is a scandal and an obstacle to future growth, for one thing -- but to underscore the stupidity of business-climate surveys.

We've raised this issue before, in relation to the most prominent example. That's the "Rich State, Poor State" series produced annually since 2008 by the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council, a leading promoter of state right-to-work laws, deregulation and tax cuts.

The series bears the bylines of conservative economist Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, who has held posts at the Heritage Foundation, Club for Growth and other conservative think tanks.

As we reported in 2019, when Moore was nominated by then-President Trump for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board (he eventually withdrew), the survey purports to judge every state's "economic outlook."

By that standard, "Rich States, Poor States" has been dead wrong every year: In all but one edition, California ranked among the worst seven states, while outpacing the top-ranked states in economic growth year after year after year.