Which of these places would you say is more economically important?
Shenzhen, China. March 2005.
Silicon Valley, California. June 2007.
Shenzhen, China. March 2005.
Silicon Valley, California. June 2007.
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Sometimes looks can be deceptiveShenzhen, China. March 2005. Silicon Valley, California. June 2007. July 6th, 2007 |
 20 comments to Sometimes looks can be deceptive |
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Meaningless question.
Without the first, would the second matter?
The second is important because it allows the first to exist.
The first is importand because it gives the second purpose.
Silly choice of pictures. Why not take a photo inside Fry’s in Sunnyvale vs. a photo of a Shenzhen city park, and ask the same question?
Shenzhen is one of the places in which things are made (although not in a supermarket), whereas I doubt that Silicon Valley will be such a place for much longer.
For all the ideology of so many big people in the computer industry (such as the man who spent ten times what McClintock spent – just to beat the “Jeffersonian Republican” in the race to Comptroller of California), California is just not a good place to do business. The taxes are high, the regulations are insane, and even such things as electricity supplies (rather important in the computer industry) are uncertain (due to the price controls of so called “deregulation”).
Sooner or later reality will trump both ideology and tradition (so many enterprises are in the Valley because once it was a good place to do business – and so many key people being in the same place creates a tradition and gravitational pull from the universities) – and Silicon Valley will no longer be an important economic centre. The United States may still have an important computer industry – but it will not be there.
However, I take your point “where there is muck there is brass” is no longer true. Indeed economic centres are often clean, nice looking places.
For example, for some years the highest manufacturing per head of population centre in the United Kingdom has been the city of Cambridge (thanks to the computer and bio tech industries, amongst others).
However, efforts to “modernize” Cambridge (for example by putting scholars under the control of the univeristy even in their off hours and demanding payments from any enterprise they run – and by general efforts to “plan” things) may undermine this.
I agree with Chris.
Except exactly reversed.
The first shows a place running away from a statist planned economy, the second shows a place running towards a statist planned economy.
Important to who?
@Jeff – nicely put.
It’s an interesting question and I like the responses. I certainly wouldn’t jump at the Silicon Valley as more important on purely an economical point. Economics is fundamentally trade and transactions. A wealthy society can be achieved merely, and I apoligise that it has been a long time since my courses to be speaking off the top of my head, by the velocity of transactions with a nod, I think, towards the amount taken in taxes and the savings rate. So, economic growth, your question, can occur whether there is progress or not.
It seems to me you wanted to ask what is more important to progress. Those pictures don’t in help the asking.
One thing many seem to overlook is that China doesn’t have alot of need to progress independently technically as they have a huge gap to close, but they are gathering the necessities for independent progress in the process, some of which are climbing out of wretched poverty, increasing wealth, and acquiring a better education.
Whether they will start to rival the US in rate of independent progress once they begin to catch up remains to be seen as there are too many societal and cultural aspects that go into making a society progressive, in the non-politcal sense, to suggest what might be for China … or the US.
Economics is about rarity. Without rarity of some form (including access) there would be no need for trade. Silicon Valley is more economically important than Shenzhen because it is rarer. There are lots of Shenzhens, there are very few Silicon Valleys.
Economic value is subjective. Neither place is more or less important except as individuals value it.
Dunno. But both would sure make dandy targets for a couple of nukes.
Ridding the world of Commies — one enclave at a time.
Shenzhen has more hot chicks.
An obvious near by place for the computer companies in S.V. to move to would be Nevada.
No State corporation tax (although there is sill the Federal one) no State income tax (ditto) and less regulated (although there are still pro union laws – Nevada is as pro union as California is).
But then “cool Californian cats” can not be so if they are not in California any more. And as the person said above – economic value is subjective, people value being in California so being in California is valuable. And as lots of computer people gather in S.V. it has become “the place to be” (which has value in its self).
However, reality is objective – and sooner or later objective reality has an effect on subjective economic value.
For example, if people value a drink that kills them (quickly – not over decades) they will die off – and so (eventually) the price of this drink will fall (as the people who valued it highly are dead).
Thus the cool Californian computer cats will one day find the cost of Californian taxes and regulations too much for them.
I only hope they do not take their California ideology with them – as they have in the case of Colorado. People have left California for Colorado, but sadly too many of them have taken Californian political ideas with them.
A similar situtation occured in New Hampshire. People migrated from Massachsetts because they did not like the effects of their ideology – but they did not understand that their ideology was the source of the problems, so they are slowly undermining New Hampshire.
That became an issue a few years ago. One guy was driving along with an eeevil black rifle (an AR-15 of one sort or another) in the rack in his pickup. He stopped at a convenience store in my city and the gun was seen by a Californian family, who got nasty about it and called police.
I show up and the yuppie ass from somewhere in greater Los Angeles started shrieking about a gun in the gunrack. I asked him, “Did he point it at you?”
“Well, no, he didn’t actually touch it.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“No, he just looked at my car and mumbled and went into the store.” (The car was a Subaru Outback with California plates.)
“Okay, wait here.”
I went and talked to the guy in the truck, an old guy who said he was a rancher and had coyote problems. I had to explain to him that I was mostly talking to him so that I could tell the other moron that I did and needless to say, he was free to leave at any time.
Mr. California was really not happy with my explanation of the fact that the other guy was perfectly within his rights even if the rifle was loaded. (It had a magazine inserted, but neither of us handled it.) He was even less happy with my not inspecting the rancher’s firearms license (as we don’t license ownership here). I can only hope he dragged his ass back to California.
Paul – have you spent any time in Nevada or Silicon Valley?
There’s a reason why people are rushing inland and its not regulation.
Maybe the question should be “Which of these places has the most expensive real estate?”.
The same is occuring here in “Research Triangle Park” North Carolina, only we also have an almost equal number of
yankiesnortherners relocating here. Both groups are happily bringing their socialistic whining with them. I am so extremely tired of all of the Californians and northerners invading NC and then bitching about things like the ability to carry a gun without a permit, or lack of “public” transportation.You all left because it was too expensive to live there, then you come here and want the same things which made you want to leave!
Gah
</rant>
What y’all could use in NC is some decent food and non-chain stores. What a howling wilderness! I mean, have you ever heard of dim sum?
Sunfish: As an officer of the law you could not just tell the Californian “liberals” to go fuck themselves – but I wish someone had told them to do so.
Daveon – are you telling me people do not like the Nevada desert?
As a matter of fact my cousin C. (a Canadian in B.C. and a government employee to boot) has spent a lot of time in Nevada and she tells me that is is not all desert.
Although, of course, Nevada is one of the fastest growing States in the Union. And the people who go there tend to be from other parts of the United States, whereas more Americans leave California (already) than go there.
Of course California still has great cultural institutions that Nevada does not. But some of those institutions are in decline (for example Stamford is not the conservative university it once was – it even turned down the Reagan library and the Hoover Institute is getting uncomfortable about being there) and as population expands in Nevada so it will be more likely that there will be enough people interested in such things as fine arts or serious music to set up cultural institutions there (of course there is nothing deterministic about this – Nevada may go down the tubes, as may the whole world, what happens will depend on what people CHOOSE to do).
After all there are buildings even in my little ordinary town of Kettering England that were in existance long before there were any cultural (Western culture) institutions in California – and they may still be standing when there no longer are any.
Still California may still offer some amusement. For example there are Mexican immigrants all over the United States (some of these immigrants are good, some are bad, and some are a bit of both) but California seems to attracting the worst ones (or perhaps the environment there is leading people down the wrong path).
It is only a matter of time before the great criminal gangs of L.A. start to follow the common Latin American practice of abducting rich people (or people who are thought to be rich – or are just in the wrong place at the wrong time) and holding them for ransom (in Mexico it is common to rape, mutilate and murder such people as well).
How could I find such a horrible prospect amusing? Well for many years (many decades in fact) the Hollywood crowd have been making films about Latin America (especially Mexico) praising the “noble revolutionaries”. For some of these Hollywood types (and the other rich Californian “liberals”) to find out (up close and personal) what these “noble” people are really like would give me great amusement.
They would finally understand what the evil concept “social justice” (which they hold so dear) actually means.
“Property values”.
If only I had one Dollar for every person who had been hit by a (credit money boom induced) real estate bubble – not in the world, just in California.
There have been so many of them (bubbles and people). Indeed S.V. is just the sort of place to have such things.
Although (of course) China has a nice credit money bubble of its own – I wonder if that is going into real estate.