Political leaders have is trying to replicate the high-tech magic of Silicon Valley since the invention of the microchip. Technologist Charles de Gaulle, then president of France, visited Palo Alto in his convertible limousine in 1960. President of the Russian Federation Dmitri Medvedev dressed casually to meet and tweeted with social media moguls in the Valley in 2010. Hundreds of eager delegations, foreign and domestic, visited in between. “Silicon Valley,” inventor and entrepreneur Robert Metcalfe once observed, “is the only place on earth that doesn’t try to be Silicon Valley.”
In America, too, leaders have long been trying to design another Silicon Valley. However, the billions of dollars in tax breaks and the “Silicon Something” marketing campaigns that followed, nowhere compare to the early track record in entrepreneurship and venture capital — and these efforts often bear fruit. benefits multinational corporations far more than regions themselves. Wisconsin promised tax breaks and more than $4 billion in subsidies to Taiwanese electronics maker Foxconn in 2017, but plans for a $10 billion factory and 13,000 jobs evaporated after hundreds of millions of dollars were lost. Tax dollars were spent preparing for the arrival of Foxconn. In 2017, a search for Amazon’s second headquarters had 238 US cities flocking together to lure one of the world’s richest corporations with subsidies and taxes, only to see HQ2 go to two places Amazon will probably choose because of their existing technology talent. One of the winners, Northern Virginia, promised Amazon up to $773 million in state and local tax subsidies — a public price for glittering high-tech towers seems especially steep as Amazon joins other tech giants in indefinitely pushing back plans to return to the office after the pandemic.
While the US tech industry is a lot bigger than it used to be, the list of top tech clusters — Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, Austin — has barely changed since the days of the 64K desktop and floppy disk. Even the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic has doing less to change this remarkably static and very unbalanced technology geography.
However, politicians are trying again. Bills that work their way through Congress include America’s Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), got a big boost to research spending, $10 billion in new grants and grants to develop “regional innovation hubs, and $52 billion to expand manufacturing.” semiconductors in water.” The Rebuild action better is currently fighting to pass the Senate including more than $43 billion for tech-focused programs to boost the local economy. These measures emphasize investment rather than tax relief, and overall invest more in economic strategy based on location compared to the United States for decades. They are full of promise. But they are just a start.
You don’t have to go far in Silicon Valley to find a tech libertarian who claims that the field’s success is purely the result of business hustle and the best that government can. do is stay away. But that conclusion ignores history. In fact, public spending plays a huge role in developing the high-tech economies in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, and Austin. Understanding how this happened is essential to envisioning where technology could evolve next.
During the world war II, the unprecedented mobilization of people and resources by the US government to remake the US economic map. Assembly lines in the recession-ravaged Midwest have resumed operations by order of the government, producing Jeeps and tanks instead of passenger cars. Scientists and technologists put aside conventional research goals to join the wartime “brain army”. Many were involved in the top secret effort to develop the atomic bomb, living in brand new communities built by the military in places so remote that they could go unnoticed: the New Mexico desert, arid plains of Eastern Washington, rural Tennessee.
World War II was a test case for using government investment to promote scientific progress and regenerate regional economies. The Cold War brought it to a large scale. Military spending that had shrunk when the war ended rose again in the early 1950s amid a new atomic arms race with the Soviet Union and war in Korea. Take a walk around the American university campus today, record the number of science buildings built in the 1950s and 1960s, and you can see the results of the concrete pouring.
Initially, the top regions of the high-tech group were on the East Coast; Boston was the nation’s largest tech economy in the 1980s. The area that eventually dislodged Boston from its high-tech throne was, before the war, best known as the prunes production capital. of the country. The only thing that sets the future of Silicon Valley apart from its agricultural partners is Stanford University, which has some pretty good engineering programs and a few alumni tinkering with startups in the industry. nearby garage.
