Superstars or Black Holes: Are Tech Clusters Causing Stagnation? - American Affairs Journal
americanaffairsjournal.org
In 2011, the economist Tyler Cowen published The Great Stagnation, a short treatise with a provocative hypothesis. Cowen challenged his audience to look beyond the gleam of the internet and personal compu­ting, arguing that these innovations masked a more troubling reality. Cowen contended that, since the 1970s, there has been a marked stagna­tion in critical…

The article argues that some federal government intervention earlier during WWII jump-started the tech innovations we saw from the 1950s to 1970s.

It also talks about how the Internet seems to be the only really new game-changing innovation since the 80s and seeks to explain why this is the case.

Among other things, of course, such as the nature of "tech clusters" such as Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas.

  • context [fae/faer, fae/faer]M6•3 months ago

    Today, the big tech clusters dominate U.S. patenting activity.

    seems implied that "number of patents" is a proxy for "innovation" rather than "rent seeking behavior"

    Inventors patent-holders are more likely to be male, come from well-off families, have parents who are inventors hold patents, are of relatively high cognitive ability (whether measured by standardized test scores or IQ tests) are good at these kinds of tests because they come from environments that value being good at these kinds of tests and so they receive extra early childhood training in taking these kinds of tests from their well-off families, and have high education levels.

    Given these demographics self-reinforcing mechanisms of socioeconomic stratification, it seems quite likely that the rise of standardized testing and meritocratically selective univer­sities probably played a key role in the ability of firms to identify the uppermost tier of innovative talent of multigenerational failchildren.

    i'm trying to fix the framing here but there's a lot to do