The US government had a transformative impact on high-tech development when its leaders were willing to spend big money on research, advanced technology, and higher education-and keep at it for quite some time. Understanding how this happened is essential to imagining where tech might grow next. In reality, public spending played an enormous role in growing high-tech economies in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, and Austin. You don’t have to travel far in Silicon Valley to find a techno-libertarian proclaiming that the sector’s success is purely the result of entrepreneurial hustle and that the best thing government can do is get out of the way. These measures emphasize investment over tax breaks, and in sum invest far more in place-based economic strategies than the US has in decades. Bills working their way through Congress include the US Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), which contains big boosts to research spending, $10 billion in new grants and subsidies to develop “regional innovation hubs, and $52 billion to expand domestic semiconductor production.” The Build Back Better Act now battling its way through the Senate includes more than $43 billion for tech-inflected programs to boost local economies. Even the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic have done little to alter this remarkably static and highly imbalanced tech geography. While the American tech industry is vastly larger than it used to be, the list of top tech clusters-the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, Austin-has remained largely unchanged since the days of 64K desktop computers and floppy disks. One of the winners, Northern Virginia, promised Amazon up to $773 million in state and local tax subsidies-a public price tag for gleaming high-tech towers that seems especially steep as Amazon joins other tech giants in indefinitely pushing back post-pandemic plans to return to the office. Amazon’s 2017 search for a second headquarters had 238 American cities falling over each other to woo one of the world’s richest corporations with tax-and-subsidy packages, only to see HQ2 go to two places Amazon likely would have chosen anyway because of their preexisting tech talent. Wisconsin promised more than $4 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn in 2017, only to see plans for a $10 billion factory and 13,000 jobs evaporate after hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars had already been spent to prepare for Foxconn’s arrival. Yet billions of dollars of tax breaks and “Silicon Something” marketing campaigns later, no place has matched the original’s track record for firm creation and venture capital investment-and these efforts often ended up benefiting multinational corporations far more than the regions themselves. In the US, too, leaders have long tried to engineer another Silicon Valley. “Silicon Valley,” inventor and entrepreneur Robert Metcalfe once remarked, “is the only place on earth not trying to figure out how to become Silicon Valley.” Hundreds of eager delegations, foreign and domestic, visited in between. Russian Federation President Dmitri Medvedev dressed business casual to meet and tweet with Valley social media tycoons in 2010. A tech-curious Charles de Gaulle, then president of France, toured Palo Alto in his convertible limousine in 1960. Political leaders have been trying to replicate Silicon Valley’s high-tech magic since the invention of the microchip.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |