Their political leaders It tries to replicate the high-tech magic of Silicon Valley since the invention of the microchip. Tech-curious Charles de Gaulle, then president of France, toured Palo Alto in his convertible limousine in 1960. Russian Federation President Dmitry Medvedev was casually dressed to meet and tweet social media tycoons in the Valley in 2010. Hundreds of enthusiastic delegates , foreign and non-governmental local, visited in between. Inventor and entrepreneur Robert Metcalfe once said: “Silicon Valley” is the only place on Earth that is not trying to figure out how to become Silicon Valley.
In the US, too, leaders have long tried to engineer another Silicon Valley. However, with billions of dollar tax breaks and marketing campaigns for “Silicon Something” later, no place beats the original registry for setting up businesses and investing venture capital — and those efforts often ended up benefiting multinationals far more than the regions themselves. Wisconsin promised more than $4 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn in 2017, only to see plans to build a $10 billion factory and 13,000 jobs evaporate after hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars had already been spent preparing for Foxconn’s arrival. Amazon searched in 2017 for a second headquarters where 238 US cities were falling on top of each other to lure one of the world’s richest companies with tax and subsidy packages, only to see HQ2 go to two places Amazon would likely choose anyway because of the pre-existing technology. talent. One winner, Northern Virginia, promised Amazon up to $773 million in state and local tax benefits — a general price for shiny high-tech towers that look especially extravagant as Amazon joins other tech giants in indefinitely delaying post-pandemic plans. named. Back to the office.
While the US tech industry is much larger than it used to be, the list of top tech clusters — Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, Austin — has remained largely unchanged since the days of 64,000 desktop computers and floppy disks. Even the disruptions wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic have done little to alter this markedly unsteady and uneven technological geography.
Politicians are still trying again. Bills making their way through Congress include the US Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), which contains significant boosts to research spending, $10 billion in new grants and subsidies to develop “regional innovation centers,” and $52 billion to expand domestic semiconductor production “. The Building Back Better Act now has its way through the Senate to more than $43 billion for technology-based programs to boost local economies. These measures emphasize investment more than tax breaks and, in short, invest far more in place-based economic strategies than the United States has in decades. They are promising. But it is just the beginning.
You don’t have to travel far in Silicon Valley to find a liberal tech guy declaring that the sector’s success is only the result of the entrepreneurial hustle and that the best thing a government can do is to get out of the way. But this conclusion ignores history. In fact, public spending has played a huge role in the growth of the high-tech economies of Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston and Austin. Understanding how this happens is essential to imagining where the technology might grow next.
during world war Second, the US government’s unprecedented mobilization of people and resources has reshaped the economic map of America. Assembly lines in the Depression-ravaged Midwest have come back to life by order of the government, taking out jeeps and tanks instead of passenger cars. Scientists and technologists put aside the usual research endeavors to join the wartime “brain army”. Many were involved in the top-secret push to develop an atomic bomb, living in entirely new communities created by the military in places too far away to go unnoticed: the deserts of New Mexico, the arid plains of eastern Washington, and the hollows of the countryside. Tennessee.
World War II was a test case for using government investment to spur scientific progress and reshape regional economies. The Cold War took it on a massive scale. Military spending that had shrunk at the end of the war was set back by the early 1950s amid a new nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and the war in Korea. Take a walk around an American college campus today, note how many science buildings were built in the 1950s and 1960s, and you can see the results of cast concrete.
Initially, the areas on top of the high-tech pile were on the East Coast; Boston was the largest technical economy in the country until the 1980s. The area that eventually ousted Boston from the high-tech throne, before the war, was best known as the nation’s plum-producing capital. One thing that set futuristic Silicon Valley apart from its agricultural peers was Stanford University, which had some very good engineering programs and a few graduates working on nearby garage construction.
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