In a piece at Bloomberg View Tyler Cowen makes several intriguing observations. First, that New York is now intellectually and politically irrelevant:
My biggest takeaway from the get-together was that today’s America has two fundamental and really quite different cultural and intellectual centers: Washington and its environs, and the Bay Area (including Silicon Valley, San Francisco and, if I may cheat a little, Seattle).
and second that the tech corridor running from San Jose through Seattle is doomed:
To date, these two new cultural and intellectual centers have proceeded on largely separate tracks, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, ignoring each other as much as possible. For the most part, it has been a good bargain, giving the nation the advantage of two distinct ways of thinking, without them stepping on each other’s toes too much.
But that won’t be the case going forward. The law-making and regulatory state will expand to cover more of tech, and tech has scaled so effectively that its products — such as autonomous cars or the possible ability to influence elections — are running into more legal and political issues.
I hope that neither observation is correct.
I would draw a different conclusion than he and it’s one that I have proposed several times here: what is subsidized prosper; what isn’t subsidized languishes. Silicon Valley rests on a foundation of defense contracts and it has been built, brick by brick, with subsidies including patents, government grants, and exemptions from tax and/or regulation.
