Along with today's release of the quarterly UCLA Anderson Forecast was a study of Southern California's aerospace industry - and things are not as glum as you might think. Economist Jack Nickelsburg points to the small increase in Socal aerospace employment over the last two years (much of it in Orange and San Diego counties) as indicative of the area's transformation from a metal bending region, where military and commercial planes were assembled, to a center of design and development of sophisticated components.

Because of the specialized nature of this activity it would be difficult to move it to another locale. Moreover, the cost of labor in these activities is not likely to be very different between states.

He sees continued growth in "knowledge intensive manufacturing," despite the phasing out of most of the metal bending stuff.