07-27-2017, 05:09 AM
(07-26-2017, 12:01 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: But note that I compared Detroit in 1955 to Silicon Valley today, and that could be a good warning. Detroit priced itself out of almost every manufacturing activity not related to the auto industry (the biggest non-automotive manufacturing company based in Detroit was Borroughs Corporation, office machines), and when Detroit-area auto manufacturers lost dominance and even moved into other places in an industry no longer growing, Detroit was in big trouble. See also "coal" in Appalachia.
Part of an industry dominating a specific area is the ability to steal experienced trained employees from other companies in the industry and region. Thus you get a surplus of software and electronics people near where the Stanford graduates started their businesses. That's all it really took to form the critical mass that built a dominant regional specialization. There would be lots of places with cheaper housing, cost of living, and other expenses, but it considered prudent to open an electronics start up near all the other electronics start ups.
Silicone Valley is not alone. Route 128 around MIT is another high tech region. I was on loan for a while at Colorado Springs, which got kick started by the Air Force. I was near Atlanta for a while, and Philadelphia. There are quite a few high tech universities and users of high tech that breed engineers of one useful flavor or another.
It wasn't that different with Gilded Age manufacturing jobs. Sure, a good part of it was other stuff. If a city had a good harbor or was located at the base of a navigable river, or there were sources of iron and coal about, you had a huge leg up. Cheap immigrant labor didn't hurt. There are lots of ways to form a mass of what is needed to get something going.
Plymouth and Carver MA have the right sort of low laying land to grow cranberries. For a long time, it was the only place cranberries were grown. The local restaurants and town halls are still full of pictures of cranberry harvests and 'bounce tables' where young ladies selected the highest bouncing and thus ripest and healthiest berries from the rest. A few years back, the local landowners abutting a lake downstream of a cranberry bog shut down the bog. They were so blatantly overusing fertilizers that the lake was becoming overgrown with weeds, algae and moss. The local cranberry industry was no longer powerful enough a job creator to keep the local government firmly in their pocket. The industry had become badly outnumbered by Boston commuters living ever further from the city. The industry is now moving to other states where the local government is looking harder for jobs.
Not sure how much this has to do with anything other than to suggest it can be complicated.
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.