lol lmao The urge to go inline on this piece of shit is overwhelming but I'm going to fight it with every bone in my body because it's not worth the time. Fundamentally it conflates a bunch of unrelated economic challenges and then holds up its hands and says "tech clusters." Why have things stagnated since the '70s? One answer is the abandonment of Bretton Woods and the financialization of banking, another answer is the limits of formerly free petroleum, another answer is the decline of the welfare state and the rise of Chicago School capitalism but yeah, let's blame it on Palo Alto or some shit. In defense of this theory the author (a microeconomist at a pharmaceutical thinktank) presupposes that educational attainment has been on a steady upward trajectory, that university openings and patent origination zipcodes are worthwhile proxies for innovation and that "value added per worker" somehow indicates a decline of individual potential rather than the rise of mechanization. Standardized testing is deployed as a tool of egalitarianism rather than a tool of racial exclusion and ignores multiple bodies of seminal research to go "what about that Tyler Cowen essay tho." What's his ultimate point? "hey how 'bout subsidies to move large corporations into tiny shithole counties." As Amazon amply proved, if the corporation wants to move they'll fucking move and bribing them to do it is a dumb fucking thing to do but when Pfizer signs your paycheck what the fuck else are you going to say. Bonus points for using the phrase "silicon beach", a term heretofore reserved for Los Angeles realtors trying to talk people into buying condos in Playa Vista. The argument isn't even genuine: That whole page is about goldbugging FFS. Put your fucking back into it you hack.2 There is even a website dedicated to cataloguing all the ways the economy has underwhelmed since 1971: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com.