Does the general population really hate tech billionaires as much as the messager class says they do? In my time amongst the normies, people seem to really like Starlinks, Amazon deliveries, and Chatpgt. What they really seem to hate are; crackheads rifling through their cars, school strikes, and rising property taxes. Someone is going to have to do a lot of explaining on how that stuff is the tech billionaires fault and not local officials.
Surely it depends on the billionaire right? I’m not exactly the median American but I personally quite like Jeff Bezos. I liked Musk before he went crazy from overdosing ketamine, social media, and sleep deprivation or whatever happened to him. Gates is obviously a great man (though I am not sure I’d marry him). Ackman can take a long walk off a short pier and can take Andreessen with him.
We need a report card that grades each billionaire so we can have more nuanced views on this. I'm guessing some of the better billionaires are the ones we've never heard of, sort of like how they say the best offensive linemen are the ones whose names you never hear.
Eh, pretty sure that 99% want to become rich dickheads. I know exactly zero people who if offered a billion dollars would turn it down and keep working their current 9-5. They of course say they wouldn't be dickheads if they were rich, but everyone else would consider them that once they were rich.
Looking at the Forbes list, the richest billionaire I've never heard of is #18 Thomas Peterffy of Florida, who made his money via discount brokerages. The richest tech billionaire I've never heard of is probably #39 Robert Pera of California, wireless networking.
One entry I was surprised to see on the list was #46 Todd Graves of Louisiana, fast food. Specifically, it appears that Graves is the founder and CEO of Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers. Is Raising Cane's really that popular? I see them around here and there, but they strike me as relatively small-time in the world of chain restaurants. Maybe it's a regional thing.
Raising Cane's is HUGE with Gen Z / Gen A. It's rapidly growing - they are adding 100 stores per year and they passed KFC last year in sales to be the third largest chicken chain in the US.
and the reason he's a billionaire is not that Cane's is a huge success but rather that he managed to retain a disproportionate amount of equity as the company has grown
I think it's both? Cane's has been a huge success and he's retained a huge amount of equity (92% according to Forbes). If the company is valued at $22B, also per Forbes, he'd be a billionaire even if he owned 20%, though.
Same here, one going up in the nearby mall. Taking over a former highly successful restaurant location which got squeezed out due to the corporate landlords getting too greedy with a golden goose (I don't understand how you make this mistake with a decades-long profitable client). So it's an expensive parcel, therefore clearly They Have The Money.
And like, yknow, I'll try them when they open...but the whole founding story of "white guy in the South just can't find any good fried chicken, decides to make his own" is not a good sign.
Probably less of a distinction here than it sounds, given how pervasive "tech" is. Most big tech CEOs are managing diversified conglomerates with a constant flow of acquisitions and spinoffs.
Not hard to blame the things you mention on billionaires—if they were paying more, we could pay teachers more so they wouldn’t strike and tax you less.
I very literally do not believe this, as no operation would function under those circumstances. Is this some definition of "chronically absent" that means like "took two sick days in one school year" or something?
Lmao, literally from the State of Illinois itself.
"The State of Illinois considers ten absences worthy of concern because “the National Bureau of Economic Research has shown that when teachers are absent for 10 days or more, student outcomes decrease significantly.”
I think the distinction is basically an illusion. The Gilded Age involved massive use of state power to violently repress attempts by workers to secure a larger share of the economic pie; it was, at a bare minimum, proto-fascist, and Mussolini et al's tactics grew directly out of it.
That’s a true description of the gilded age and a poor description of fascism. It was more akin to a feudal arrangement and traditional plantation economics than it was fascism.
We could just use the term income inequality, which just kind of happens and can probably only be counteracted by taxing the rich much more aggressively than most U.S. voters are willing to do.
The Gilded Age is a good historical reference for income inequality even if its causes are somewhat different. It's as if the rich always get richer even if a society finds ways to reverse this to some extent. Thus, violence against unions was dealt with and then unions and redistributive taxing just disappeared anyway. Accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is the entropy of human economics.
Does the book do comparative international stuff? How do public services look outside the US in more highly unionized countries and less unionized ones? Or is the claim itself meant to be restricted to the US?
Paying public servants a pittance so that agencies can't hire anyone is, to Norquist-ophiles like him, a feature, not a bug; it ensures that those agencies will not function.
As long as you are willing to get rid of the police and fire unions as well since they are the ones who really milk the public dollar rather than the teachers unions.
Well, Trump is unpopular, and the tech billionaires went all in on Trump and supported his election and then kissed the ring at the inauguration. Amoral oligarchs are never really popular.
I believe the poster is unable to distinguish between "not publicly being a Resistance Democrat" and "supporting Trump' (or queit post-election neutrality / avoidance from support)
He prevented the Washington Post from making an endorsement for the 2024 election, which it had been doing for decades. They were going to endorse Harris, and he personally prevented it. It was a direct pro-Trump intervention and eliminated the independence of the editorial board. This isn’t neutrality.
It was handled terrible - Bezos pulled the editorial at the last minute. Personally, even if made pretextually, I agreed with the sentiment that a newspaper that seeks to be a national paper shouldn’t endorse candidates (as opposed to opinion columnists doing so in their editorials). He should have implemented and explained that policy a year before, not right before the paper went to print.
But independence of the editorial board? It’s the opinion section of a paper, and it’s his paper. It’s entirely his prerogative to have a house view and create the editorial section in his imagine It may or may not be a compelling product or good business decision. There is nothing untoward about that.
By all accounts, Bezos is personally a Reason-magazine style libertarian. Free markets, free minds, socially liberal. Trump ain’t that.
Post-election, he did essentially bribe the Trump family by suggesting and then funding the Melania documentary. That’s discrediting, but nowhere near the same thing as endorsing or contributing to his reelection efforts.
That meeting where they were all there with Trump kissing his ass was disturbing...I mean did the Big Three Auto execs do that when Reagan was elected? Maybe it happened more surreptitiously and I didn't know about it.
The obsequiousness with Trump is unique to Trump, because of who Trump is. But CEOs of major companies at the inauguration, various Inauguration Day events, and meeting with the President is common. Because it was so cold, Trump’s 2025 inauguration moved inside and the crowd was much smaller, they were more prominent. Recall that before the Dems want anti-tech, there was a very close relationship between the Obama campaigns and White House with Google and Facebook.
There are good products and then there are their sociopathic founders that piss in everyone else's cereal. They'd all be better off if no one knew what they got up to in their spare time.
Depends on the message diet for who you are looking at? I'd wager the "general population" that leans heavily on Fox News has a very different view than the folks that regular substack.
This is not much different from how folks view any rich person, either. If said person is "on their team," people have a much more favorable view of them. Regardless of what they do.
"Tech" people, I assert, make up a large part of the discourse online. And there is a bit of a lottery effect on it. Most of the "online class" went to college with tech folks that got very high paying jobs. Even folks that got a good job knew plenty that got better ones. And online started selling resentment pretty heavily.
Not exactly refuting your point but: there seems to be a tendency to hate companies among their enthusiastic consumers. Everyone on YouTube seems to hate google. When I was getting into OneWheel, all the youtube channels seemed to rag on OneWheel corporate. Gaming communities seem to hate the game developer companies. So I can see people loving and using the convenience of Amazon while hating Amazon
It’s pocket change but I’m pretty sure Ackman gave 100k to the widow of one of the soldiers killed in the tanker crash. The dude has terrible politics to put it lightly and says som remarkably dumb stuff but there’s decency in a lot of people
I think indeed that idea of Americans hating billionnaires as a group is a Lefty Proggy online group-think error.
this is not to take a view it is right or wrong per se but is I think very much like the wokey-woke self-sale on a very academic inflected identarian approach to politics .
In my daily life I hear people complaining about kids using AI to cheat, or their colleague using it to write an email they should have written themselves; they like Amazon, but not Bezos or his politics infecting the WaPo; and they don’t know what starlink is, but really don’t like that a billionaire seemingly bought an election.
I never hear anyone talk about crackheads, school strikes, and while in my neighborhood, they don’t complain about raising property taxes, I do hear a lot about efficiency and general use of tax dollars.
Idk it seems kind of crazy for Krugman to assert, without any argument, that we haven’t seen huge benefits, so I’m not sure this needs to be shoehorned into the “housing theory of everything.”
Incomes have risen faster in the US than in Europe. One obvious channel: tech became a big, high-paying sector attracting high-skilled graduates. This pushed up demand for high-skill labor and wages. The extra income generated by tech was also spent on non-tradable services to a large extent, pushing up wages in those sectors as well. (Of course there are other reasons for faster income growth in the US, but it’s hard for me to believe this didn’t contribute anything.)
How would we know the counterfactual? Without building more housing, have we gotten 10% of the boom Matt would’ve expected or 90%? (I lean towards the latter.) How do we know that the story I laid out above somehow pales in comparison to Matt’s housing explanation for the lack of a boom?
(A note: Matt often talks up agglomeration benefits, but a lot of the quantifications of agglomeration benefits in econ are completely implausible garbage. Many of the Hsieh/Moretti papers, in particular, have horrible coding errors.)
"Techbro billionaires are corrupting our politics" is a convenient way of eliding the fact that Democratic candidates lose because the Democratic Party is unpopular, and the Democratic Party is unpopular because it holds a variety of positions that are broadly unpopular with the voting public.
Oh, BS. While the Democratic brand is unpopular, a plurality of their policy positions poll quite favorably with voters. And if you think Thiel, Musk, and other techbros haven’t exerted an undue and corrupting influence on our politics, I’m afraid you haven’t been paying very close attention.
"the Democratic brand is unpopular, a plurality of their policy positions poll quite favorably with voters."
What if I were to tell you that this is also true of Republican policy positions? Its not that the parties don't have popular policy positions, its that those policy positions generally cannot be reconciled with reality. Popular Democratic policy position - "many more government services, tax raises only on the ultra rich." Republican popular position - "tax cuts for everyone while only cutting government services for bad people and foreigners."
Then why aren't the Democrats focusing on those favorable policy positions instead of still being stuck in the DEI/Gender/Warren Bernie economics, etc. era. I haven't seen many of those far left yard signs coming down yet, you know, the ones where they pronounce their elitist moral high ground on science and humanity.
More people have the conservative opinion on abortion than the liberal one?
I guess it depends on where the lines are. "Abortion on demand" will lose, but I don't think the conservative analogue is "no abortion at all."
*EDIT* Liberal is abortion on demand with free abortions for poor people, so no wonder it's not popular. Elite middle is legal in first two trimesters. Conservative is legal in first trimester only.
Por Que no los dos? Democratic Party positions are unpopular *and* tech bro billionaires are corrupting our discourse! Just look at the rancid shit Melon Husk has posted on Xitter.
He should have clarified that it was bad tech bros corrupting our politics, because the good tech bros who have correct opinions aren't doing anything wrong.
All of that can be true though. Democratic primary voters won’t acknowledge where they are out of touch.
Tech bros are not special, but money in politics is incredibly corrupting. I do believe for instance that ed tech lobbying has significantly harmed public schools in the United States far more than teachers unions.
One specific position that seems very toxic for Democrats is gun control. Saw these earlier, and my immediate thought was, "are the Democrats going to find a way to blow 2026?"
> Additionally, those who already have the weapons who want to keep them would be required to obtain certification from the state and allow law enforcement to enter their home and make sure they’re being stored correctly.
I responded to a comment below saying I do agree that he's become less interesting to read on substack. But I think comparing him to Stephen Moore, an economist who has contributed absolutely nothing to his profession, is wrong.
There's obviously an asymmetry. Leftwing hacks are going to be more institutional and more intellectually rigorous. Rightwing hacks are going to try to sell memorative gold coins to seniors.
Krugman has a lot of value to offer but he also has never and would never disagree with the democratic establishment, and that makes him a hack. A smart hack, but a hack nonetheless.
He repeatedly criticized the Obama administration (quite famously actually) for not going big enough on the stimulus in 2009 (he was right btw. We can debate how much moderate Dems in Congress were responsible for the stimulus being too small, but directionally he was correct). He also repeatedly criticized the Obama administration's pivot to deficit reduction in 2011 as misguided given the lack of inflation and still elevated unemployment and as giving to "Very Serious People". He used that phrase deliberately to point out too many centrist and left of center pundits were advocating for deficit reduction when the case for deficit reduction was weak.
This idea he would not disagree with the Democratic establishment is just factually incorrect with two very important examples noted above.
The democratic establishment wanted the fiscal stimulus to be bigger. People tend to forget how much anti-deficit energy there was in politics at that time (that was putatively the Tea Party's whole thing).
To marry this point to the one I made below, Krugman is more "interesting" when the Dems are in power because he doesn't feel as much urgency to do everything he can (effective or not) to protect the edifice of liberal democracy. No doubt he also saw his criticism of Obama as constructive, that it would have helped the admin politically in the long run if they had listened to him (and he was right!).
Krugman has said as much. Even in the '00s, he explicitly took the position that the right was so much bigger of a threat to the country that it was his obligation as a public intellectual to focus his criticism there, not on left-wingers who have no real power or on fellow liberals whose faults are much less harmful. I think his point of view on this was/is overly simplistic, but I also can't say he was entirely wrong!
I think this view is wrong because literally no rightwingers would see a Krugman column and change their opinion. The only people who can get others to change their minds are those who already share their values.
It’s not a fair comparison. Krugman is a PhD-holding, academic economist. Moore is not. To be clear, this is not an insult. They just come from different worlds. Moore is a creature of libertarian/conservative think tank and media world. His job is to be a booster of things, in which I assume he believes. There is nothing wrong with that - that’s what we are doing here!
Paul Krugman is (supposedly) one of the best economists of his age, and his economists works of the 90s really was extraordinary. My observation, is that as a political pundit, he has as much expertise as anyone of us. “Tech bro billionaires are hijacking our politics” is not exactly a particularly enlightening or unique insight, regardless of its truth.*
Given his actual expertise, he could have used his NYTimes perch, then his Substack, to communicate economics, which is one of the most misused (often unintentionally) and abused subjects. Maybe introduce people to tradeoffs and thinking about opportunity cost (sexy, I know).
*while Silicon Valley moved rightward in 2025, it was not a monolith. To the extent the Valley was involved in politics, it was overwhelmingly donating to democrats and we didn’t hear a lot about it. What we did hear was laudatory. I remember hearing about how evil the Koch brothers were. I always found the “rich guy supports candidate he agrees with or cause he likes” to be a “dog bites man,” not “man bites dog” story. Small dollar donors, and primary voters, are far more ideologically and support the fringe candidates who win in low turnout primaries.
It’s sad, really. In the econ profession he was known not only as a brilliant economist, but also as an incredible teacher.
Then he started writing columns and immediately became one of the least interesting public intellectuals — he basically just did political hackery. He’s somehow gotten even worse since then.
I know some people really don't like hist Trump era writing but I don't think your claim is remotely true about eg the Bush era columns, which have been proved quite right over time.
I feel like he's gotten worse on substack. Most of his posts are just very generic bluesky takes like: we wouldn't care about oil prices if we had a 100% renewable energy economy.
Agree his substack takes have mostly been pretty uninteresting “orange man bad” takes with some interesting stuff sprinkled in. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him engage with abundance ideas or on how Democrats could be more effective. I used to read his nyt columns religiously but now find his writing pretty frustrating to read: i can’t see how reading another “trump bad” take helps anything. By contrast, Matt’s posts on how Dems can be more effective seem like they could change things if they were more widely read.
I haven't been reading him much recently (enough substacks already) but the more straightforward point that there's a real tension between "let's cancel renewable energy" and "let's bomb Iran", resolvable only by appeal to fossil fuel identity politics, is correct and important.
I would read that post Matt linked to. Because I think it’s points to a more subtle change in Krugman’s writing. The rhetorical flourish at the end was groan inducing and yes likely a reflection of the fact is audience leans even more left than it did at the Times.
But read the rest of the post. It provides a decent amount of data that the divergence in EU and US GDP growth is a bit illusionary or at the very least not as stark as banner headlines suggest.
Now I think even he would say that there is even more to the story. One of the first things I thought about is that when we’re talking EU economic stats, we’re talking about a large number of countries. So it includes both Germany who’s economic performance has only been “meh” last 10 year and Poland which has zoomed forward.
My point is that while i think there is more to be said about EU vs US economic performance and that there may be some holes or more to the story than Krugman is noting. His basic point that charts purporting to show HUGE (dare I say Yuge!) divergence in GDP growth between US and EU are the very least misleading at least to a degree…seems pretty correct as far as I can tell.
"In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king".
Fifteen upvotes so far, wow. No one clicks through links? People really want Krugman to look good? The paper is an incredible example of how range restriction can produce any outcome you want.
It’s honestly impressive for a sixty-page undergrad term paper, but it's not serious evidence of Paul Krugman’s perspicacity.
Most of the people they ranked weren't even pundits! The authors scored people based on the predictions speakers made during Sunday political talk shows.
The paper’s dataset includes the following “pundits”: David Brooks, Paul Krugman, Kathleen Parker, Cal Thomas, Maureen Dowd, George Will, E. J. Dionne, Peggy Noonan, Mark Shields, David Gergen, Nina Totenberg, Eleanor Clift, Al Hunt, Bill Kristol, William Safire, Cokie Roberts, Donna Brazile, James Carville, Karl Rove, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman, Carl Levin, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Hank Paulson.
Two thirds of those people are ferocious partisan actors that weren’t even trying to be right or make accurate predictions.
I remember reading that paper when it came out. I saw a table of the predictions graded (can't find it now, would love to see it if someone can find it) and being struck that the predictions varied wildly in what I might call "safety." I remember that one of the predictions made was something to the effect of "labor unions will mostly endorse Democrats."
Some of the predictions weren't even about politics; I remember that George Will was graded on a bunch of baseball stuff.
I didn’t say he was wrong about everything. I said he was an uninteresting political hack, which is very different.
To the extent that the Democratic Party was right about stuff, so was he. Whenever they were wrong, so was he.
His basic failure is that he never really explained anything interesting about economics. We just got iteration #1,576 of “do more stimulus.” Reading his columns, you’d come away with the idea that the IS-LM model is long-settled science and the only thing you need to know about macro. This has ruined a generation of wonky journalists.
I just don't think this is remotely accurate. He regularly wrote about economic issues in more detail than you suggest. And he was notably an opponent of eg the Iraq War when most Democrats were for it.
Look, you might think reading a bunch of Krugman columns gave you a good idea of how economists think about these issues. Maybe you’re right.
All I can say is that until I was in grad school, I had exactly that impression. My professors were… unimpressed by the knowledge I’d gained from Krugman columns, and I quickly understood why.
We’ll see how his Trump era columns age. His Bush era columns have held up very well. He was right on the budget chicanery and clear on the basic incompetence of the Bush administration. A lot of right-coded moderates got mad at him then, but his columns seem, in the main, to have been correct.
Worse than the man himself is his commentariat. Worst commentators of any Substack. It's just a race to see who can be the first and loudest to thank the heavens for "Dr. Krugman." I've seen interesting points that added something to the article made there maybe two or three times, ever.
I've fought the good fight a few times, but it's deeply sycophantic. I've seen the same on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Substack (but sometimes they bite! He had to add "but removing Mossadegh was bad, too!" the day after he pointed out how terrible the Iranian regime is)
I don't read her, but I hear Heather Scott-Richardson's fans are the same way. I sense a type...
Yeah this whole post is a bit confusing. The technology sector built technology. The large infrastructure projects ended up being massive data centers scattered all over the country. The cloud revolution was essentially tech saying "here's how we power our industry, now these tools are available to everyone to use for their industries." There was tons of partnership and investment with heavy industries. At some point the question has to be 'why aren't the building industries building stuff.' and we know the answer isn't due to a lack of tech. It's because they are prevented from building by local NIMBY+anti gentrication alliance(s).
But somehow every other comment here is that "tech bros" (pejorative) should have also been responsible for changing the landscape of major cities. Seems like an extremely odd position to take imo.
I’m more on the side of Ed Abbey and Butlerian jihad here than that of the data centers, but they certainly serve useful purposes in many cases. Sometimes they’re even a net positive.
There's correlation here, and the causal story is plausible, but the "housing theory of everything" is a big assertion and one wants more. For ex, did constrained supply of software engineers limit employment growth as much as housing did? Was the learning curve for building semicon fabs, slower than for meat-packing houses, a major factor? I can imagine data that would help, but I don't know how to get it. Did housing-cost-to-wages ratio really rise more slowly in Detroit and Chicago than in the Bay Area? Did the number of design engineers in Detroit also follow the mega-city growth curve MY cites or was the Detroit curve driven by factory workers in a way that was much less true in the Bay Area? It's fine to publish teaser theories and the post was provoking. But SB readers would probably dunk on a similar assertion, for ex, that explosive growth in trade with China caused a reduction in working-class wages.
My problem with Krugman has always been that there are two Krugmans - one is the economist and the other is the progressive polemicist, and he seems to mix those quite often.
The main thing Europeans are proud of about their economy is that high skill wages are about the same as low skill wages. Having increasingly lucrative opportunities that do not include literally every last person in your society (down to the most dysfunctional) is how you get runaway inequality.
Exactly. Perhaps there are other differences between the nature of the work of the tech industry and the automotive industry, or the broader macro setting of late vs early 20th century, aside from local housing policy that may have driven changes in population growth? I am in general a believer in the yimby/abundance theory of housing, but this particular claim seems under-supported.
Also, the indirect or spillover benefits of these tech companies is difficult to overstate. For example, Facebook invented Pytorch, which was a key ingredient in making AI eventually. Would AI have happened without Facebook? Maybe. Maybe not. But probably not without a huge tech sector investing billions of dollars in making it easier to program computers.
Paul Krugman 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
It seems like it boosts the income of engineers in Dayton Ohio in a straightforward way. I can threaten to move to California and work there. Cheaper housing in California would increase the price point on my labor in Ohio even more.
I suppose that matters to the extent that it’s easier for an engineer to move from Dayton to San Francisco than to move from London or Vancouver to San Francisco.
In 2018 I lived in the bay and visited Hong Kong, and it was just so obvious that everything people said about why SF couldn't grow (water use, preserving nature and parks, traffic) was just a lie and we could be like Hong Kong if we bothered to try.
'There are things like political newsletters, where the audience for Slow Boring is quasi-bounded by the borders of the United States because interest in American politics (for good reason) drops quite a bit when you leave the country. "
That would make a lot of sense, but it doesn't seem true. Interest in American politics is extremely high in many countries, often getting as much attention as their domestic politics.
The people I know in Taiwan (obviously selection bias here) are all really knowledgable about US politics. Also, the national media here covers US politics a ton because of how dependent the country is on favorable relations.
So honestly maybe not the best example. But I do think what you're saying is true in many other countries as well.
BBC journalists seem disappointed when they have to talk about British politics. It is always federal politics, foreigners pay little attention to state politics even when important and relevant.
I come from and am living in the republic of Georgia and am a subscriber of Slow Boring, as well as a patreon supporter to a bunch of American creators. I’d argue if you create content in English about anything your potential market is the whole world (which is so unfair lol)
There is a general English language cultural sphere, where media is consumed by plenty of people for whom English is a second language and produced by Americans, Brits and Swedes.
P.S. I have no idea why it is always Swedes and never Norwegians, Germans or Indians.
The state of Uttar Pradesh gets much less attention than places like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu or Punjab, but has more people tha Spain, France, the UK and Italy combined. Yet I am sure I am far more likely to read or listen to things written by Swedes.
Not sure about Sweden in general, but Stockholm specifically has a nice little tech cluster. Quite a few popular games that feel very "American", like Helldivers 2, are actually made in Stockholm.
Indian and Western internet communities interact surprisingly little despite both being English speaking and huge. But if there is some minor reason for Indians to notice it will be blow up. Real Engineering on YouTube did a video on how successful India's space programme is, but he included an outline of India which showed a divided Kashmir so got huge amounts of abuse and decided to not cover engineering in India again.
I can confirm that I read Vox and Slate before I moved to the US, and I’m not a native English speaker. I know other people from my home country who still read more niche American publications. I don’t know any Americans who read the publications of my home country. When I go home for Christmas, people are more interested in debating, e.g., US gun laws rather than the politics of our own country. (That last part wasn’t remotely true before I moved to the US, but now people are thinking that “Hey, we now have someone who lives there, let’s learn more!”.)
I often listen to foreign (English-language) podcasts because it's nice to listen to other people's problems... unfortunately no one escapes having the United States be one of their problems these days.
I remember a brief window after the UK had voted for Brexit but before we voted for Trump, where I consumed lots of British coverage of Brexit so I could enjoy feeling superior to other country's political situations. Alas, that did not last long.
US political discourse is a cultural export the way the Premier League or the Royal family is a British export.
Why did I need to read about Princess Diana's personal life or her work on landmines. Why do I follow a team I have no local connection to and hope we win our first league title in 22 years. The New York Times has more coverage of the Premier League than it does of the local team in the MLS and ongoing coverage on some Prince Andrew. It is baffling.
There is still a fair amount of interest abroad (I'm from the UK), but it's surely true that it is lower than interest in the US. I imagine SB's subscribers are noticeably higher per capita from America than anywhere else, surely.
I am sure that is true though probably also true for lots of British Substacks, but I would guess London, Canberra or Ottowa have as many per capita subscribers as Austin or Indianapolis.
Boston and biotech is an interesting comparison here. The past 10 years saw massive investment in the industry, and specialized lab buildings sprouted *literally everywhere* to capture that. But housing construction was still lethargic, and at the tail end of the boom the state was beginning to see net outmigration. Now that the COVID bubble has worked its way through the system and RFK et al have chilled investment, we’re stuck with a 34% of this lab space sitting unused in what *should* be the US’s competitor with Shanghai. Of course the industry is notoriously spiky, but I wonder if it would be more robust to shocks like this with lower costs and a stronger local economy. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/06/business/boston-lab-market-over-supply/
This whole post is, I feel, a bit misguided. The technology sector built technology. They invested hundreds of billions in development of data centers all over the country as a way to make the back end cloud+AI available to all industries. The technology of the 21st century is information management. There was further billions poured into partnerships where modernizing legacy industries from brick&mortar retail to metals&mining to heavy machinery supply chains and so on so those physical industries could utilize the same information management tooling.
At a certain point the question is why the builders are not building, now with the tools readily available and fairly cheap, especially compared to the technical systems of the prior era. The answer is obviously not that the tech industry stopped it, but that the NIMBY+anti gentrification alliance stopped it. We can't even REBUILD los angeles or lahaina after fires burned down large swaths of urban areas.
The idea that tech should somehow also be responsible for remaking the face of America is silly when what commenters are calling "tech bros" (pejorative) run chip making, cloud tech, and advertising tech firms. In the 2010s any attempt to expand the footprint of the campuses themselves was met with SF/San Jose local derision. Egged busses. Screaming anti gentrification activists.
Google Fiber, being sold off now, had to negotiate with each municipality for almost a decade before any cable could be laid. IMO it's everyone else that needs to look inward here as to why the technology handed to other industries on a silver platter is not being effectively utilized to effectively rebuild the modern face of America.
I think the point of the piece is that the NIMBY + anti-gentrification alliance kept tech from booming as much as it could have which would have benefited Americans even more, not that the tech industry should have solved the problems of NIMBYism.
Back in the 2010’s there was a rise in assaults in Seattle’s gayborhood. They occurred primarily on a stretch that had a bunch of bars and occurred at night. Serious people claimed that this spike was tech bros beating people up for being gay. Writers at one of our alt weeklies (their archives are incomplete so I haven’t tried to fo d the articles) actually seriously made this claim and suggests that this was more likely than drunk people getting into fights or drunk people getting their phones stolen by opportunistic thieves. That was the point where I realized that a lot of the anti-tech people were seriously unhinged.
NIMBYs aren't stopping the rebuilding of Los Angeles. Well, as long as we rebuild it the way it was before. (And actually the residents of Pacific Palisades at least have a good argument for rebuilding it like it was before.)
Although it is funny to think of people objecting to the gentrification of Pacific Palisades.
I feel like this article’s thesis is fine about most topics but, written about SV, requires us to ignore that at least two, if not four, of the big players are just selling digital crack.
I feel like this criticism is largely disingenuous because while people levy this criticism at Zuckerburg, they never apply the inverse to Bezos or (especially) Musk.
I mean, folks hate Musk for reasons besides his products? Though Twitter as his product is also a reason? Hating some folks for producing bad shit and other folks for being gigantic fucking assholes is actually perfectly plausible, though I agree some people may phrase it badly or use one for cover of broader class complaints.
Hate for Elon has nothing to do with Tesla and everything to do with his insane political behavior since ~2022. The dude literally elevated a conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi.
Oh yeah, wasn't that like fifty years ago? Definitely when I first started wondering what the hell was going on with this guy who was supposed to be cool.
The Thai thing was weird is that Musk's initial take was really ordinary.
It's a cliche that any white man living in Asia (especially Southeast Asia) is at best disreputable, and probably a deviant of some kind. It's a totally normal albeit tacky thing to joke about. Throw in a few shibboleths like "orientalism" and "colonizer" and it's plausibly even left-coded.
That still doesn't mean it's appropriate to direct it at a guy who's leading a rescue effort for stranded kids! But Musk was just being petty and childish rather than political. It's only when he doubled down and refused to apologize that he started to go in a weird political direction.
oh for you no I think your criticism is totally legit.
My response was for the majority of anti-SV people who share your criticism of Musk for those reasons but also think Amazon, Tesla, etc. are bad. You seem intellectually consistent here.
Matt mentioned Star Trek: Picard but I'm doing through Star Trek: Discovery now and they've twice name-dropped Musk the same way they would name drop Hawking or Einstein. It's funny how different things were less than a decade ago.
The tech bros seem to be NIMBYs in general when it comes to their political priorities. They moved to Donald Trump as he was doubling down on NIMBYism in the 2024 election. There is a strong element of egalitarianism in YIMBY thought and practice that I don’t think they accept.
The tech bros as a whole were notoriously pro-Democrat donors for 15 years, and their widows/ex-wives still are. They've been Trump-leaning for what, 1-2 years? Let's wait a bit before passing judgment on the utility of a huge, fast-growing sector.
I mean, the death count from Musk's actions already seem to be in the hundreds of thousands due to USAID cuts. Usually you have to be a dictator to get numbers like that.
Mark Burnett is the unsung villain of American history. If he hadn’t produced “The Apprentice,” would Trump have been successful as a POTUS candidate in 2016? More likely he would have flamed out and remained an asshole businessman/celebrity.
It’s funny, I had the exact same conversation on, IIRC, the VoteDem subreddit. It was “The Apprentice” which rescued Trump from “washed up 80’s period piece” to “decisive business mogul” and thence to “the non-politician who will drain the swamp, aka Donald the Dove.”
Mark Burnett IS the unsung villain of American history.
Silicon Valley seems to be fine continuing to work closely w/ Elon after he supported policies that led to the deaths of thousands. Unlike Ukraine, they're not fighting for their lives.
I'm not blaming them (completely) for their support of him in 2016. But in 2026. Absolutely.
Hot take: they should've stuck to being donors (to whomever they wished) and restricted their interactions with the regime to lobbying for their bottom line. No Melania movies, no DOGE, no gold Apple watches, just good old-fashioned lobbying and campaign cash.
Yes, well, there's something about Trump that makes everyone do weird, dumb stuff that they'll regret in 10 years. It's his superpower: bringing everyone down to his level.
The cause and effect runs the other direction: the vast majority of tech people are still on the blue team, but after the blue team decided that tech people are villains some percentage of tech people eventually got sick of being hated on and switched to the red team.
I don't think this is true at all. There were large plans to develop the campuses and surrounding areas of San Jose in the 2010s that were effectively neutered by NIMBY / anti gentrification types. My co workers cars and buses were egged by angry SF leftists as they went to work for it. The calculus was more "not worth engaging with it"
He's a NIMBY in San Mateo County actually. His NIMBY letter was to the city of Atherton, an exceedingly weathy city in San Mateo County. Still Silicon Valley though.
Did Tech bros support Trump? They are less openly opposed to Trump than they were in his first term and make deals with him, but I am sure Kamala won more tech billionaire votes than Trump and the same will be true in 2028.
They made sure not to endorse Harris. That was a clear intervention (that led to resignation of editors of newspapers) in support of Trump. It was a functional endorsement of Trump.
Then why spike it? If it is so useless, what did Bezos have to worry about? He was worried, and he did spike it, so clearly it matters. He was afraid of Trump and bent the knee.
You might be introduced to the concept of business interests, costs and the like.
Then you might read a bit on the data of the past decades showing newspaper endorsements not being meaningful in at minimum Presidentials.
But I am sure nothing will change your righteous partisan frothing.
Not to say I support the idea of not-endorsing, but the reality is WP or La times endorsing or not Harris is not meaningful in reality. indeed overall in the 21st century the endorsements are not meaningful, they are archaisisms of a past era, largely of interest to the Pre Sold Partisan of whatever flavor to tout.
You might be introduced to the idea of a non-profit corporation. You might also be aware of the special role of media companies in both custom and law in democracies as crucial parts of the free press. If Bezos didn't want to preserve a free press, he was free not to buy the Washington Post. Again, just because it isn't always pleasant to own a newspaper doesn't mean one is free to abrogate the societal responsibility one has to defend a free press.
I think supporting a free press is part of our inheritance as Americans. Using terms like "righteous partisan frothing" suggests to me that you don't value a free press or having a democracy. I suggest you move to Russia where you can experience the lack of democracy and a free press free and clear where the oligarchs pursue only their business interests and costs.
I refer you to Abraham Lincoln, “As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
I’m not sure about that. Most suburbs are quite NIMBY. Whether it’s tech employees showing up in town halls to protest against new construction, I don’t know for sure.
As a veteran of far too many public hearings in Silicon Valley where residents are shouting down housing, I can testify that it's not tech employees. It's boomer retirees.
Libertarians have been about charter cities for awhile. Not sure these kind of cities are possible when you have all of a specific set of laws and policies that differentiate it, an openness to others moving in, and democracy.
People who think Pacific Palisades should be rebuilt to be much denser really should go there and take a look around before opining. There's one road for entry and exit (Sunset Boulevard). People almost died trying to flee and when traffic came to a grinding halt many had to abandon their cars and make their way out on foot.
But, sure, let's double the population there.
I'm all for more and denser housing in LA but let's be realistic.
Topography is such an arcane mysterious science. Only those initiated in it learn that there are types of topography where building a road would be a really dumb thing to do.
Whether a road is stupid depends on what’s at either end. The worst topography between valuable locations is a no brainer and the easiest topography between two nowheres is the dumbest idea.
We’re not talking about anything that is fundamentally difficult like launching a spaceship to Alpha Centauri or counting the tulips on an alien world.
There was never a major fire like that in Los Angeles. There were two small neighborhoods that were significantly affected, but most of the city was not, and real estate prices have actually been falling over the past year and a half.
This is the time that interest rates have been declining.
I haven’t compared Los Angeles real estate to other cities in this past year (I’ve been looking at Los Angeles real estate myself) but I expected upward pressure from the fires, and yet it doesn’t seem to be as large as I had expected, probably because of how small these neighborhoods are compared to the urban area as a whole.
Agree on you later points that the area affected wasn't that large compared to the rest of LA. More that the reasons that prices have come down is that demand is softening. In large part because the actual costs of buying has gone up. I know a lot of places were sold with interest rate buy downs for the first couple of years, with the expectation that interest rates would drop and you could refinance then. I've seen less of those because interest rates don't seem like they will drop as much. So the 1% interest rate drop over the last year and half has been countered by rising long term expectations.
Or at least that has been my read on it. I could be way off! If you have other reasons you think the market is softening, I'd be interested.
I definitely don’t have other explanations! My main point was just that the neighborhoods affected by the fires were small enough that they don’t have much effect on the urban area as a whole, even in something as directly relevant as real estate prices.
I was thinking a strike (metaphorically) to take down the supreme leaders (again, metaphorically) of marin county to spur development, but you are thinking big.
No mention of how many fewer people tech employees than past major industries? For example Ford, once one of America's national champions, employs 390,000 people today. I'm not going to put into the time to look up how many people it employed in the 50s relative to the US population then, but I'm guessing 'a lot'? Meta by contrast has about 78,000 employees, and probably even fewer just in the US. OpenAI, maybe the most significant company in the world right now, has a little over 4000 employees. Less employees in the main industry means less city population overall
I am not an economist, but 60,000 software engineers making $180K with a Keynesian multiplier of 2 can support 360,000 teachers, auto mechanics, etc. making $60K (plus the occasional yacht merchant in Sausalito)
Yeah, in the background of this entire article was "maybe all those extra people aren't there because they're surplus to requirements." It's as much a story about capital's dominance over labor as anything else.
I think you have to weigh the benefits of the tech boom with the costs of a lot of the new technology. Google and Meta destroyed the newspaper industry which is bad, social media is basically an unalloyed negative, tech bro politics is pretty awful (meritocracy fanaticism, dilettantism with a little bit of Randian sociopathy), Amazon is handy but also Bezos is a horrible human. Krugman is right to hate those people.
It's terrible what Bezos did to the Washington Post but damn it I like Amazon.
And what was the alternative for the Post? Being bought by David Ellison? Unfortunately, you need rich people to keep legacy media alive and there aren't too many good guys among the uber rich.
I don't think about these people in terms of good guys and bad guys, although there are some bad guys (looking at you, Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel). I just see guys responding predictably to incentives.
I mean, the Washington Post seemed to be doing fine pre-Bezos takeover. There are a lot of newspapers where you can say, 'dang, what can you do' but the Post weren't one of them!
Unironically, it could've been spun out as a non-profit (note I am not sure that'd be legally and financially possible but just as a pie in the sky thing) and be doing better now than under Bezos.
By “meritocracy fanaticism” of course we mean “continued to employ white men as software engineers even after we told them how gross that is.” I for one am grateful!
Yeah, when the counterfactual is another country having the tech industry having SV here is positive, when the alternative is tech ending for good worldwide with UNIVAC I think we’d be fools for not choosing the second timeline. The internet has proven not just bad but insurmountably so. And billionaires are only good to the extent that their wealth recirculates
Idk, I like digital maps, MRIs, and mobile banking. Is there a third option where we keep technology but not social media? When people talk about how they hate technology or "the phones" that's usually what they have a problem with.
I use GPS, but I sure am against it. Would be best to just force those with poor senses of direction (that is, most folks) into a subservient underclass.
The real problem is algorithmic social media. Like, old school 2009 Facebook where yes, people posted dumb political takes was fine. Not great, but a fairly minor negative.
As decidedly not keen as I was on having been born at all a world without the amazing technology I have access to is so much worse. It'd be like being born in a world without penicillin or radio.
I mean, but once you have a/c and antibiotics not much else is necessary. I would be ok with a priestly caste of healthcare workers and scientists that had access to tech for the purposes of medical breakthroughs so long as no one else could use it
There is a whole genre of videos of Europeans learning how much their American counterparts make. And before anyone starts ranting edit: France, as an example, have higher out of pocket medical costs than the US.
I don't know why so many struggle to understand that America is a richer country with a higher standard of living.
Because I've been told a million times by Bernie that 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. He must be right otherwise someone would have corrected him by now. /s
Out of pocket healthcare spending is higher in the US than Germany ($1472 per capita vs $944 per capita in 2024). Germany may spend more out of pocket as a percentage of total healthcare expenditures, but German healthcare expenditures are lower than the US.
This is all great, but there’s a bit of a confounding factor in a few of the comparisons. All US cities in 1880-1930 had much larger growth spurts than anything now could, just because that’s the era when rural people moved into cities, so even the cities that weren’t booming then grew quite a bit. Similarly for Chinese cities in 1980-2020.
The comparison to Houston and Jacksonville in recent decades is certainly apt, but those growth spurts are smaller than the ones mentioned for Chicago and Detroit or Shenzhen, and that’s the limit of what could have been expected here.
Right, China looks like it's doing things right because....they still had a massive amount of their people living as peasants in rural areas when I was alive and watching Ninja Turtles on Saturday mornings.
Not to mention that those rural and out of area people were moving to get unskilled/lower-skilled jobs in huge factories. What would be the equivalent in Silicon Valley?
They would be opening restaurants and barber shops and doing construction and driving buses and all the other jobs that exist in a growing metro area. “Selling shovels to the gold miners”, as it were.
That would be great, but not exactly the foundation for an economic boom.
And more likely I think it would mean that all the poor folks who have to make horrendous commutes to do these jobs would be able to live a lot closer, but maybe not *that* much else would change.
That actually *is* the foundation for an economic boom. A boom just is a lot more people getting paid more to do productive things. If real estate had been more plentiful, it would have benefited a lot more people, rather than just the people willing to do mega-commutes.
But there has to be some foundational industry that powers the rest of the boom, like autos in Detroit or transportation (and meatpacking) in Chicago. A denser SV would have a lot more people providing services to the rich employees in tech but that sounds more like Dubai than 20th century Detroit.
Bay Area is not lacking people who would do these things. The only issue I've faced is that plumbers/handymen are very hard to find on an urgent basis because they either live far away or are swamped with work.
It was recently pointed out that the booming cities of the South (Atlanta) and Southwest are actually reaching their limits no matter how much building they allowed since it was mostly all SFH and the commutes beyond the sprawl are untenable.
This essay does invite a few thoughts in response.
First, not all urban tech clusters are excluded from that growth chart. King WA (Seattle) and Travis TX (Austin) are very much tech agglomerations, and they are in the top 10.
But more importantly, the growth of tech means that jobs can be anywhere. Also, unlike industrial centers of the twentieth century, the apex of software requires very few developers. Meanwhile, other tech-related jobs that spring from software are free to locate anywhere. And so we see counties like Maricopa and Hillsborough (Tampa) FL on that list.
Those counties are home to a large number of middle and back office professionals - accountants, call centers, etc - that are enabled by tech to be in metro areas with low costs of living, low taxes, and aggressive pro-growth policies. Perhaps this distribution of relative prosperity might actually be a better outcome than cramped clustering in dense urban megacities. While this pattern does not spread the extreme wealth of the Bay Area, it does spread plenty of well-paying jobs around the country more so than in the industrial era.
This is exactly right. Tech billionaires exist because the marginal cost of that product is close to zero. And the production of those products looks completely different than the place centered world of manufacturing. Matt's argument is pretty bizarre.
You didn’t need to be employed in high finance to enjoy its spillover effects on life in New York. But you pretty much do need to work in tech to justify moving to San Francisco. That’s an important difference.
This is 2022 thinking. Silicon Valley has laid off or forcibly relocated almost everyone it hired in the US outside of its hubs (SF/SEA/NY). US hiring has slowed to a trickle and all of it is in the hubs. They’ll hire 500 people in a Bangalore or Hyderabad office before even one US remote.
Except that effect is not in any way linked to the United States. That effect has happened in every country. It doesn’t depend on being in the same country as the headquarters of the tech industry.
Does the general population really hate tech billionaires as much as the messager class says they do? In my time amongst the normies, people seem to really like Starlinks, Amazon deliveries, and Chatpgt. What they really seem to hate are; crackheads rifling through their cars, school strikes, and rising property taxes. Someone is going to have to do a lot of explaining on how that stuff is the tech billionaires fault and not local officials.
Surely it depends on the billionaire right? I’m not exactly the median American but I personally quite like Jeff Bezos. I liked Musk before he went crazy from overdosing ketamine, social media, and sleep deprivation or whatever happened to him. Gates is obviously a great man (though I am not sure I’d marry him). Ackman can take a long walk off a short pier and can take Andreessen with him.
We need a report card that grades each billionaire so we can have more nuanced views on this. I'm guessing some of the better billionaires are the ones we've never heard of, sort of like how they say the best offensive linemen are the ones whose names you never hear.
I'm sure plenty of billionaires are dickheads. Is punishing dickheads high on the list of voter priorities?
American politics in a nutshell:
Half the voters want to punish the rich dickheads.
Half the voters want to become the rich dickheads.
Eh, pretty sure that 99% want to become rich dickheads. I know exactly zero people who if offered a billion dollars would turn it down and keep working their current 9-5. They of course say they wouldn't be dickheads if they were rich, but everyone else would consider them that once they were rich.
People you know may not be the norm. Of course, progressive anti-billionaires aren’t the norm, either.
Looking at the Forbes list, the richest billionaire I've never heard of is #18 Thomas Peterffy of Florida, who made his money via discount brokerages. The richest tech billionaire I've never heard of is probably #39 Robert Pera of California, wireless networking.
One entry I was surprised to see on the list was #46 Todd Graves of Louisiana, fast food. Specifically, it appears that Graves is the founder and CEO of Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers. Is Raising Cane's really that popular? I see them around here and there, but they strike me as relatively small-time in the world of chain restaurants. Maybe it's a regional thing.
Raising Cane's is HUGE with Gen Z / Gen A. It's rapidly growing - they are adding 100 stores per year and they passed KFC last year in sales to be the third largest chicken chain in the US.
and the reason he's a billionaire is not that Cane's is a huge success but rather that he managed to retain a disproportionate amount of equity as the company has grown
I think it's both? Cane's has been a huge success and he's retained a huge amount of equity (92% according to Forbes). If the company is valued at $22B, also per Forbes, he'd be a billionaire even if he owned 20%, though.
Just about to open one here in Westwood Village next to UCLA, a couple minutes walk for me. And it's really big!
Same here, one going up in the nearby mall. Taking over a former highly successful restaurant location which got squeezed out due to the corporate landlords getting too greedy with a golden goose (I don't understand how you make this mistake with a decades-long profitable client). So it's an expensive parcel, therefore clearly They Have The Money.
And like, yknow, I'll try them when they open...but the whole founding story of "white guy in the South just can't find any good fried chicken, decides to make his own" is not a good sign.
Interesting. I don't know if I really approve of chicken fingers, personally. Fried chicken should be eaten off the bone.
Todd Graves has also been a guest shark on Shark Tank.
Ackman is a hedge fund manager, not a tech guy.
True, but I’m not going to pass up an opportunity to run him down!
Probably less of a distinction here than it sounds, given how pervasive "tech" is. Most big tech CEOs are managing diversified conglomerates with a constant flow of acquisitions and spinoffs.
Liked because your "nonmedian" tastes match mine perfectly!
People like some of the companies but view their leaders pretty negatively:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate-silver-bulletin
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4583555-majority-of-us-voters-hold-unfavorable-views-of-bezos-zuckerberg-poll/amp/
Not hard to blame the things you mention on billionaires—if they were paying more, we could pay teachers more so they wouldn’t strike and tax you less.
If we didn't allow public unions, the teachers wouldn't strike either.
And we would get a lot better service for our dollars
Chicago has some of the highest teacher pay in the Union, yet 40% of them are chronically absent.
I very literally do not believe this, as no operation would function under those circumstances. Is this some definition of "chronically absent" that means like "took two sick days in one school year" or something?
It's defined as missing 10 or more school days, ~roughly 1 every 2 weeks (per this article):
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/over-2-in-5-chicago-teachers-chronically-absent/
Lmao, literally from the State of Illinois itself.
"The State of Illinois considers ten absences worthy of concern because “the National Bureau of Economic Research has shown that when teachers are absent for 10 days or more, student outcomes decrease significantly.”
https://timdaly.substack.com/p/teacher-absenteeism-epitomizes-our?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4pc64t
I was not aware that Chicago schools had contracted to a 20-week school year. A normal school year here in San Francisco is 38 weeks.
They should fix that!
There is a strong argument that Chicago schools don't function.
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/just-2-in-5-chicago-students-read-at-grade-level-under-lowered-proficiency-standards/
"If we didn't allow workers to have rights, we could pay them nothing! Nothing I tells ya!"
Man, people say some wildly fascist things on this (allegedly) liberal website.
I agree with your overall point, but it’s not good to dilute the f-word by overuse. Here, I think the more apt comparison is to the Gilded Age.
I think the distinction is basically an illusion. The Gilded Age involved massive use of state power to violently repress attempts by workers to secure a larger share of the economic pie; it was, at a bare minimum, proto-fascist, and Mussolini et al's tactics grew directly out of it.
So every pre-20th Century government was fascist?
That’s a true description of the gilded age and a poor description of fascism. It was more akin to a feudal arrangement and traditional plantation economics than it was fascism.
We could just use the term income inequality, which just kind of happens and can probably only be counteracted by taxing the rich much more aggressively than most U.S. voters are willing to do.
The Gilded Age is a good historical reference for income inequality even if its causes are somewhat different. It's as if the rich always get richer even if a society finds ways to reverse this to some extent. Thus, violence against unions was dealt with and then unions and redistributive taxing just disappeared anyway. Accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is the entropy of human economics.
If you actually care about effective provision of public services I suggest reading "Not Accountable" by Phillip K. Howard.
Public unions are basically incompatible with good public services.
Pick one.
Does the book do comparative international stuff? How do public services look outside the US in more highly unionized countries and less unionized ones? Or is the claim itself meant to be restricted to the US?
Forget it, Jake, it's mathewtown.
Paying public servants a pittance so that agencies can't hire anyone is, to Norquist-ophiles like him, a feature, not a bug; it ensures that those agencies will not function.
Sure, I understand that fascists make arguments. I just do not agree with them.
I've been a public servant for the last 15 years and the claim is utterly ridiculous.
Got it. You won't let any facts intertrude on your worldview
As long as you are willing to get rid of the police and fire unions as well since they are the ones who really milk the public dollar rather than the teachers unions.
I'm willing to get rid of all of them.
Well, Trump is unpopular, and the tech billionaires went all in on Trump and supported his election and then kissed the ring at the inauguration. Amoral oligarchs are never really popular.
What do you mean “went all in on Trump”? Did any of them actually support his election?
Elon, Ellison and Marc Andreessen backed Trump but I am pretty sure the median Silicon Valley Billionaire was a Harris supporter.
David Sachs, Bezos
Wait, did Bezos support Trump?! When did that happen? The main thing I heard was that he stayed conspicuously neutral, like a few other media owners.
I believe the poster is unable to distinguish between "not publicly being a Resistance Democrat" and "supporting Trump' (or queit post-election neutrality / avoidance from support)
Your belief is wrong. Newspapers make endorsements all the time, but suddenly it’s impossible to do so if it will make Trump unhappy?
He prevented the Washington Post from making an endorsement for the 2024 election, which it had been doing for decades. They were going to endorse Harris, and he personally prevented it. It was a direct pro-Trump intervention and eliminated the independence of the editorial board. This isn’t neutrality.
Same thing happened at the Los Angeles Times with Soon-Shiong
It was handled terrible - Bezos pulled the editorial at the last minute. Personally, even if made pretextually, I agreed with the sentiment that a newspaper that seeks to be a national paper shouldn’t endorse candidates (as opposed to opinion columnists doing so in their editorials). He should have implemented and explained that policy a year before, not right before the paper went to print.
But independence of the editorial board? It’s the opinion section of a paper, and it’s his paper. It’s entirely his prerogative to have a house view and create the editorial section in his imagine It may or may not be a compelling product or good business decision. There is nothing untoward about that.
By all accounts, Bezos is personally a Reason-magazine style libertarian. Free markets, free minds, socially liberal. Trump ain’t that.
Post-election, he did essentially bribe the Trump family by suggesting and then funding the Melania documentary. That’s discrediting, but nowhere near the same thing as endorsing or contributing to his reelection efforts.
He did win the popular vote
That meeting where they were all there with Trump kissing his ass was disturbing...I mean did the Big Three Auto execs do that when Reagan was elected? Maybe it happened more surreptitiously and I didn't know about it.
The obsequiousness with Trump is unique to Trump, because of who Trump is. But CEOs of major companies at the inauguration, various Inauguration Day events, and meeting with the President is common. Because it was so cold, Trump’s 2025 inauguration moved inside and the crowd was much smaller, they were more prominent. Recall that before the Dems want anti-tech, there was a very close relationship between the Obama campaigns and White House with Google and Facebook.
Some of the time "Billionaires" is just a replacement for other terms like Illuminati or Globalists in bizarre irrational conspiracy theories.
There are good products and then there are their sociopathic founders that piss in everyone else's cereal. They'd all be better off if no one knew what they got up to in their spare time.
I don't think people LOVE tech billionaires but they don't hate their guts either.
Depends on the message diet for who you are looking at? I'd wager the "general population" that leans heavily on Fox News has a very different view than the folks that regular substack.
This is not much different from how folks view any rich person, either. If said person is "on their team," people have a much more favorable view of them. Regardless of what they do.
"Tech" people, I assert, make up a large part of the discourse online. And there is a bit of a lottery effect on it. Most of the "online class" went to college with tech folks that got very high paying jobs. Even folks that got a good job knew plenty that got better ones. And online started selling resentment pretty heavily.
Not exactly refuting your point but: there seems to be a tendency to hate companies among their enthusiastic consumers. Everyone on YouTube seems to hate google. When I was getting into OneWheel, all the youtube channels seemed to rag on OneWheel corporate. Gaming communities seem to hate the game developer companies. So I can see people loving and using the convenience of Amazon while hating Amazon
It’s pocket change but I’m pretty sure Ackman gave 100k to the widow of one of the soldiers killed in the tanker crash. The dude has terrible politics to put it lightly and says som remarkably dumb stuff but there’s decency in a lot of people
I think indeed that idea of Americans hating billionnaires as a group is a Lefty Proggy online group-think error.
this is not to take a view it is right or wrong per se but is I think very much like the wokey-woke self-sale on a very academic inflected identarian approach to politics .
In my daily life I hear people complaining about kids using AI to cheat, or their colleague using it to write an email they should have written themselves; they like Amazon, but not Bezos or his politics infecting the WaPo; and they don’t know what starlink is, but really don’t like that a billionaire seemingly bought an election.
I never hear anyone talk about crackheads, school strikes, and while in my neighborhood, they don’t complain about raising property taxes, I do hear a lot about efficiency and general use of tax dollars.
Idk it seems kind of crazy for Krugman to assert, without any argument, that we haven’t seen huge benefits, so I’m not sure this needs to be shoehorned into the “housing theory of everything.”
Incomes have risen faster in the US than in Europe. One obvious channel: tech became a big, high-paying sector attracting high-skilled graduates. This pushed up demand for high-skill labor and wages. The extra income generated by tech was also spent on non-tradable services to a large extent, pushing up wages in those sectors as well. (Of course there are other reasons for faster income growth in the US, but it’s hard for me to believe this didn’t contribute anything.)
How would we know the counterfactual? Without building more housing, have we gotten 10% of the boom Matt would’ve expected or 90%? (I lean towards the latter.) How do we know that the story I laid out above somehow pales in comparison to Matt’s housing explanation for the lack of a boom?
(A note: Matt often talks up agglomeration benefits, but a lot of the quantifications of agglomeration benefits in econ are completely implausible garbage. Many of the Hsieh/Moretti papers, in particular, have horrible coding errors.)
"Techbro billionaires are corrupting our politics" is a convenient way of eliding the fact that Democratic candidates lose because the Democratic Party is unpopular, and the Democratic Party is unpopular because it holds a variety of positions that are broadly unpopular with the voting public.
Oh, BS. While the Democratic brand is unpopular, a plurality of their policy positions poll quite favorably with voters. And if you think Thiel, Musk, and other techbros haven’t exerted an undue and corrupting influence on our politics, I’m afraid you haven’t been paying very close attention.
"the Democratic brand is unpopular, a plurality of their policy positions poll quite favorably with voters."
What if I were to tell you that this is also true of Republican policy positions? Its not that the parties don't have popular policy positions, its that those policy positions generally cannot be reconciled with reality. Popular Democratic policy position - "many more government services, tax raises only on the ultra rich." Republican popular position - "tax cuts for everyone while only cutting government services for bad people and foreigners."
But how many of these techbro's were Obama voters and supporters?
Then why aren't the Democrats focusing on those favorable policy positions instead of still being stuck in the DEI/Gender/Warren Bernie economics, etc. era. I haven't seen many of those far left yard signs coming down yet, you know, the ones where they pronounce their elitist moral high ground on science and humanity.
"While the Democratic brand is unpopular, a plurality of their policy positions poll quite favorably with voters."
Copium.
https://substack.com/@milansingh/note/c-228855371?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=7jbfd
More people have the conservative opinion on abortion than the liberal one?
I guess it depends on where the lines are. "Abortion on demand" will lose, but I don't think the conservative analogue is "no abortion at all."
*EDIT* Liberal is abortion on demand with free abortions for poor people, so no wonder it's not popular. Elite middle is legal in first two trimesters. Conservative is legal in first trimester only.
Yes. The polls on abortion are highly dependent on the specifics.
Por Que no los dos? Democratic Party positions are unpopular *and* tech bro billionaires are corrupting our discourse! Just look at the rancid shit Melon Husk has posted on Xitter.
He should have clarified that it was bad tech bros corrupting our politics, because the good tech bros who have correct opinions aren't doing anything wrong.
All of that can be true though. Democratic primary voters won’t acknowledge where they are out of touch.
Tech bros are not special, but money in politics is incredibly corrupting. I do believe for instance that ed tech lobbying has significantly harmed public schools in the United States far more than teachers unions.
It would be interesting to hear more about ed tech lobying vs teachers' union lobying.
One specific position that seems very toxic for Democrats is gun control. Saw these earlier, and my immediate thought was, "are the Democrats going to find a way to blow 2026?"
https://www.kvrr.com/2026/03/11/minnesota-state-senator-proposes-assault-weapon-ban-restrictions-on-current-owners/
https://reason.com/2026/03/11/here-are-12-bills-democrats-just-passed-to-trample-gun-rights-in-virginia/
https://www.kptv.com/2026/02/19/proposed-oregon-ballot-measure-ban-hunting-fishing-reports-new-fundraising-details/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/new-mexico-s-semiautomatic-ban-common-sense-safety-or-war-on-law-abiding-citizens/ar-AA1W0zrw
> Additionally, those who already have the weapons who want to keep them would be required to obtain certification from the state and allow law enforcement to enter their home and make sure they’re being stored correctly.
god's sake.
Krugman knows where his bread is buttered. Just the leftwing version of Stephen Moore.
I responded to a comment below saying I do agree that he's become less interesting to read on substack. But I think comparing him to Stephen Moore, an economist who has contributed absolutely nothing to his profession, is wrong.
There's obviously an asymmetry. Leftwing hacks are going to be more institutional and more intellectually rigorous. Rightwing hacks are going to try to sell memorative gold coins to seniors.
Krugman has a lot of value to offer but he also has never and would never disagree with the democratic establishment, and that makes him a hack. A smart hack, but a hack nonetheless.
A fair elaboration.
"Allan's" formulation is not actually correct.
He repeatedly criticized the Obama administration (quite famously actually) for not going big enough on the stimulus in 2009 (he was right btw. We can debate how much moderate Dems in Congress were responsible for the stimulus being too small, but directionally he was correct). He also repeatedly criticized the Obama administration's pivot to deficit reduction in 2011 as misguided given the lack of inflation and still elevated unemployment and as giving to "Very Serious People". He used that phrase deliberately to point out too many centrist and left of center pundits were advocating for deficit reduction when the case for deficit reduction was weak.
This idea he would not disagree with the Democratic establishment is just factually incorrect with two very important examples noted above.
The democratic establishment wanted the fiscal stimulus to be bigger. People tend to forget how much anti-deficit energy there was in politics at that time (that was putatively the Tea Party's whole thing).
To marry this point to the one I made below, Krugman is more "interesting" when the Dems are in power because he doesn't feel as much urgency to do everything he can (effective or not) to protect the edifice of liberal democracy. No doubt he also saw his criticism of Obama as constructive, that it would have helped the admin politically in the long run if they had listened to him (and he was right!).
The Obama administration did not decide the size of the stimulus. The Congress did. Obama had the choice of either signing the bill or vetoing it.
Krugman has said as much. Even in the '00s, he explicitly took the position that the right was so much bigger of a threat to the country that it was his obligation as a public intellectual to focus his criticism there, not on left-wingers who have no real power or on fellow liberals whose faults are much less harmful. I think his point of view on this was/is overly simplistic, but I also can't say he was entirely wrong!
I think this view is wrong because literally no rightwingers would see a Krugman column and change their opinion. The only people who can get others to change their minds are those who already share their values.
Ted Kaczynski did a lot of good academic work before losing his mind.
I used to work with a guy (of Polish background) who point to Ted Kaczynski as proof of how smart Poles are.
It’s not a fair comparison. Krugman is a PhD-holding, academic economist. Moore is not. To be clear, this is not an insult. They just come from different worlds. Moore is a creature of libertarian/conservative think tank and media world. His job is to be a booster of things, in which I assume he believes. There is nothing wrong with that - that’s what we are doing here!
Paul Krugman is (supposedly) one of the best economists of his age, and his economists works of the 90s really was extraordinary. My observation, is that as a political pundit, he has as much expertise as anyone of us. “Tech bro billionaires are hijacking our politics” is not exactly a particularly enlightening or unique insight, regardless of its truth.*
Given his actual expertise, he could have used his NYTimes perch, then his Substack, to communicate economics, which is one of the most misused (often unintentionally) and abused subjects. Maybe introduce people to tradeoffs and thinking about opportunity cost (sexy, I know).
*while Silicon Valley moved rightward in 2025, it was not a monolith. To the extent the Valley was involved in politics, it was overwhelmingly donating to democrats and we didn’t hear a lot about it. What we did hear was laudatory. I remember hearing about how evil the Koch brothers were. I always found the “rich guy supports candidate he agrees with or cause he likes” to be a “dog bites man,” not “man bites dog” story. Small dollar donors, and primary voters, are far more ideologically and support the fringe candidates who win in low turnout primaries.
It’s sad, really. In the econ profession he was known not only as a brilliant economist, but also as an incredible teacher.
Then he started writing columns and immediately became one of the least interesting public intellectuals — he basically just did political hackery. He’s somehow gotten even worse since then.
I know some people really don't like hist Trump era writing but I don't think your claim is remotely true about eg the Bush era columns, which have been proved quite right over time.
There was even a study from 2011 that found that Krugman had the highest record of correct predictions among the top 10 liberal and top 10 conservative pundits: https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/An-Analysis-of-the-Accuracy-of-Forecasts-in-the-Political-Media.pdf
I feel like he's gotten worse on substack. Most of his posts are just very generic bluesky takes like: we wouldn't care about oil prices if we had a 100% renewable energy economy.
Agree his substack takes have mostly been pretty uninteresting “orange man bad” takes with some interesting stuff sprinkled in. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him engage with abundance ideas or on how Democrats could be more effective. I used to read his nyt columns religiously but now find his writing pretty frustrating to read: i can’t see how reading another “trump bad” take helps anything. By contrast, Matt’s posts on how Dems can be more effective seem like they could change things if they were more widely read.
I haven't been reading him much recently (enough substacks already) but the more straightforward point that there's a real tension between "let's cancel renewable energy" and "let's bomb Iran", resolvable only by appeal to fossil fuel identity politics, is correct and important.
I would read that post Matt linked to. Because I think it’s points to a more subtle change in Krugman’s writing. The rhetorical flourish at the end was groan inducing and yes likely a reflection of the fact is audience leans even more left than it did at the Times.
But read the rest of the post. It provides a decent amount of data that the divergence in EU and US GDP growth is a bit illusionary or at the very least not as stark as banner headlines suggest.
Now I think even he would say that there is even more to the story. One of the first things I thought about is that when we’re talking EU economic stats, we’re talking about a large number of countries. So it includes both Germany who’s economic performance has only been “meh” last 10 year and Poland which has zoomed forward.
My point is that while i think there is more to be said about EU vs US economic performance and that there may be some holes or more to the story than Krugman is noting. His basic point that charts purporting to show HUGE (dare I say Yuge!) divergence in GDP growth between US and EU are the very least misleading at least to a degree…seems pretty correct as far as I can tell.
I don’t think so. He has written a lot of really helpful primers.
"In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king".
Fifteen upvotes so far, wow. No one clicks through links? People really want Krugman to look good? The paper is an incredible example of how range restriction can produce any outcome you want.
It’s honestly impressive for a sixty-page undergrad term paper, but it's not serious evidence of Paul Krugman’s perspicacity.
Most of the people they ranked weren't even pundits! The authors scored people based on the predictions speakers made during Sunday political talk shows.
The paper’s dataset includes the following “pundits”: David Brooks, Paul Krugman, Kathleen Parker, Cal Thomas, Maureen Dowd, George Will, E. J. Dionne, Peggy Noonan, Mark Shields, David Gergen, Nina Totenberg, Eleanor Clift, Al Hunt, Bill Kristol, William Safire, Cokie Roberts, Donna Brazile, James Carville, Karl Rove, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman, Carl Levin, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Hank Paulson.
Two thirds of those people are ferocious partisan actors that weren’t even trying to be right or make accurate predictions.
I remember reading that paper when it came out. I saw a table of the predictions graded (can't find it now, would love to see it if someone can find it) and being struck that the predictions varied wildly in what I might call "safety." I remember that one of the predictions made was something to the effect of "labor unions will mostly endorse Democrats."
Some of the predictions weren't even about politics; I remember that George Will was graded on a bunch of baseball stuff.
I didn’t say he was wrong about everything. I said he was an uninteresting political hack, which is very different.
To the extent that the Democratic Party was right about stuff, so was he. Whenever they were wrong, so was he.
His basic failure is that he never really explained anything interesting about economics. We just got iteration #1,576 of “do more stimulus.” Reading his columns, you’d come away with the idea that the IS-LM model is long-settled science and the only thing you need to know about macro. This has ruined a generation of wonky journalists.
I just don't think this is remotely accurate. He regularly wrote about economic issues in more detail than you suggest. And he was notably an opponent of eg the Iraq War when most Democrats were for it.
Look, you might think reading a bunch of Krugman columns gave you a good idea of how economists think about these issues. Maybe you’re right.
All I can say is that until I was in grad school, I had exactly that impression. My professors were… unimpressed by the knowledge I’d gained from Krugman columns, and I quickly understood why.
Yeah I’m pretty sure the American Communist Party was right about the war in Iraq.
Were the right about the dishonesty of the Bush administration budget calculations?
A hack is someone who repeats the party line. Being right is incompatible with being a hack.
This isn’t right. He was correct on the economics in a way that a lot of Democrats didn’t understand.
Except that the "do more stimulus" was a U-turn from "the deficit is an existential threat" which was his repeated point throughout the Bush years.
So he… was correct in both instances?
Lol
We’ll see how his Trump era columns age. His Bush era columns have held up very well. He was right on the budget chicanery and clear on the basic incompetence of the Bush administration. A lot of right-coded moderates got mad at him then, but his columns seem, in the main, to have been correct.
This is an inane comment
Worse than the man himself is his commentariat. Worst commentators of any Substack. It's just a race to see who can be the first and loudest to thank the heavens for "Dr. Krugman." I've seen interesting points that added something to the article made there maybe two or three times, ever.
I've fought the good fight a few times, but it's deeply sycophantic. I've seen the same on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Substack (but sometimes they bite! He had to add "but removing Mossadegh was bad, too!" the day after he pointed out how terrible the Iranian regime is)
I don't read her, but I hear Heather Scott-Richardson's fans are the same way. I sense a type...
Yeah this whole post is a bit confusing. The technology sector built technology. The large infrastructure projects ended up being massive data centers scattered all over the country. The cloud revolution was essentially tech saying "here's how we power our industry, now these tools are available to everyone to use for their industries." There was tons of partnership and investment with heavy industries. At some point the question has to be 'why aren't the building industries building stuff.' and we know the answer isn't due to a lack of tech. It's because they are prevented from building by local NIMBY+anti gentrication alliance(s).
But somehow every other comment here is that "tech bros" (pejorative) should have also been responsible for changing the landscape of major cities. Seems like an extremely odd position to take imo.
Silicon Valley has been strangled almost to death by housing prices. There are no more garage startups here because the houses are 2 million dollars.
There's no where left to build except up. I gather the NIMBYs are against multistory apartments/condos?
The massive data centers scattered across the country are spectacularly unpopular.
yeah the people are wrong
I’m more on the side of Ed Abbey and Butlerian jihad here than that of the data centers, but they certainly serve useful purposes in many cases. Sometimes they’re even a net positive.
There's correlation here, and the causal story is plausible, but the "housing theory of everything" is a big assertion and one wants more. For ex, did constrained supply of software engineers limit employment growth as much as housing did? Was the learning curve for building semicon fabs, slower than for meat-packing houses, a major factor? I can imagine data that would help, but I don't know how to get it. Did housing-cost-to-wages ratio really rise more slowly in Detroit and Chicago than in the Bay Area? Did the number of design engineers in Detroit also follow the mega-city growth curve MY cites or was the Detroit curve driven by factory workers in a way that was much less true in the Bay Area? It's fine to publish teaser theories and the post was provoking. But SB readers would probably dunk on a similar assertion, for ex, that explosive growth in trade with China caused a reduction in working-class wages.
My problem with Krugman has always been that there are two Krugmans - one is the economist and the other is the progressive polemicist, and he seems to mix those quite often.
The main thing Europeans are proud of about their economy is that high skill wages are about the same as low skill wages. Having increasingly lucrative opportunities that do not include literally every last person in your society (down to the most dysfunctional) is how you get runaway inequality.
Exactly. Perhaps there are other differences between the nature of the work of the tech industry and the automotive industry, or the broader macro setting of late vs early 20th century, aside from local housing policy that may have driven changes in population growth? I am in general a believer in the yimby/abundance theory of housing, but this particular claim seems under-supported.
Also, the indirect or spillover benefits of these tech companies is difficult to overstate. For example, Facebook invented Pytorch, which was a key ingredient in making AI eventually. Would AI have happened without Facebook? Maybe. Maybe not. But probably not without a huge tech sector investing billions of dollars in making it easier to program computers.
It's 100% on brand
Paul Krugman 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
It seems like it boosts the income of engineers in Dayton Ohio in a straightforward way. I can threaten to move to California and work there. Cheaper housing in California would increase the price point on my labor in Ohio even more.
Yep, according to levels.fyi, the median comp for software engineers is higher in Dayton than Paris or Tokyo. Not bad!
Ya, but then you have to deal with the perpetual construction on I-75 that has gone on for 25 years.
"deal with the perpetual construction" is basically the entire art of software engineering
“What’s behind this API?
“Technical debt”
“And that?”
“More technical debt”
“And what’s behind that?”
“Brother, it’s technical debt all the way down.”
The Chinese food is not as good, but chili is more plentiful.
China Garden is legit good and it’s funny because it’s owned and run by Indians.
Well, "chili".
It’s Skyline Time
I suppose that matters to the extent that it’s easier for an engineer to move from Dayton to San Francisco than to move from London or Vancouver to San Francisco.
Also, a lot of the tech that engineers use in Dayton wouldn't exist without a massive tech sector pushing investment in tech
In 2018 I lived in the bay and visited Hong Kong, and it was just so obvious that everything people said about why SF couldn't grow (water use, preserving nature and parks, traffic) was just a lie and we could be like Hong Kong if we bothered to try.
California allocates more water to alfafa than human residents living in houses.
'There are things like political newsletters, where the audience for Slow Boring is quasi-bounded by the borders of the United States because interest in American politics (for good reason) drops quite a bit when you leave the country. "
That would make a lot of sense, but it doesn't seem true. Interest in American politics is extremely high in many countries, often getting as much attention as their domestic politics.
The people I know in Taiwan (obviously selection bias here) are all really knowledgable about US politics. Also, the national media here covers US politics a ton because of how dependent the country is on favorable relations.
So honestly maybe not the best example. But I do think what you're saying is true in many other countries as well.
BBC journalists seem disappointed when they have to talk about British politics. It is always federal politics, foreigners pay little attention to state politics even when important and relevant.
I come from and am living in the republic of Georgia and am a subscriber of Slow Boring, as well as a patreon supporter to a bunch of American creators. I’d argue if you create content in English about anything your potential market is the whole world (which is so unfair lol)
There is a general English language cultural sphere, where media is consumed by plenty of people for whom English is a second language and produced by Americans, Brits and Swedes.
P.S. I have no idea why it is always Swedes and never Norwegians, Germans or Indians.
There are more people in Indian cities I've barely heard of than there are in all of Sweden.
The state of Uttar Pradesh gets much less attention than places like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu or Punjab, but has more people tha Spain, France, the UK and Italy combined. Yet I am sure I am far more likely to read or listen to things written by Swedes.
Not sure about Sweden in general, but Stockholm specifically has a nice little tech cluster. Quite a few popular games that feel very "American", like Helldivers 2, are actually made in Stockholm.
The weird bit is not why Sweden, but why not everyone else.
Noah Smith talks about India and the internet here:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/herecomesindia
Massive rise in Indian internet users. I can't say for certain that I've noticed it but it could be felt very much very shortly.
Indian and Western internet communities interact surprisingly little despite both being English speaking and huge. But if there is some minor reason for Indians to notice it will be blow up. Real Engineering on YouTube did a video on how successful India's space programme is, but he included an outline of India which showed a divided Kashmir so got huge amounts of abuse and decided to not cover engineering in India again.
I can confirm that I read Vox and Slate before I moved to the US, and I’m not a native English speaker. I know other people from my home country who still read more niche American publications. I don’t know any Americans who read the publications of my home country. When I go home for Christmas, people are more interested in debating, e.g., US gun laws rather than the politics of our own country. (That last part wasn’t remotely true before I moved to the US, but now people are thinking that “Hey, we now have someone who lives there, let’s learn more!”.)
I often listen to foreign (English-language) podcasts because it's nice to listen to other people's problems... unfortunately no one escapes having the United States be one of their problems these days.
I remember a brief window after the UK had voted for Brexit but before we voted for Trump, where I consumed lots of British coverage of Brexit so I could enjoy feeling superior to other country's political situations. Alas, that did not last long.
US political discourse is a cultural export the way the Premier League or the Royal family is a British export.
Why did I need to read about Princess Diana's personal life or her work on landmines. Why do I follow a team I have no local connection to and hope we win our first league title in 22 years. The New York Times has more coverage of the Premier League than it does of the local team in the MLS and ongoing coverage on some Prince Andrew. It is baffling.
There is still a fair amount of interest abroad (I'm from the UK), but it's surely true that it is lower than interest in the US. I imagine SB's subscribers are noticeably higher per capita from America than anywhere else, surely.
I am sure that is true though probably also true for lots of British Substacks, but I would guess London, Canberra or Ottowa have as many per capita subscribers as Austin or Indianapolis.
Boston and biotech is an interesting comparison here. The past 10 years saw massive investment in the industry, and specialized lab buildings sprouted *literally everywhere* to capture that. But housing construction was still lethargic, and at the tail end of the boom the state was beginning to see net outmigration. Now that the COVID bubble has worked its way through the system and RFK et al have chilled investment, we’re stuck with a 34% of this lab space sitting unused in what *should* be the US’s competitor with Shanghai. Of course the industry is notoriously spiky, but I wonder if it would be more robust to shocks like this with lower costs and a stronger local economy. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/06/business/boston-lab-market-over-supply/
This whole post is, I feel, a bit misguided. The technology sector built technology. They invested hundreds of billions in development of data centers all over the country as a way to make the back end cloud+AI available to all industries. The technology of the 21st century is information management. There was further billions poured into partnerships where modernizing legacy industries from brick&mortar retail to metals&mining to heavy machinery supply chains and so on so those physical industries could utilize the same information management tooling.
At a certain point the question is why the builders are not building, now with the tools readily available and fairly cheap, especially compared to the technical systems of the prior era. The answer is obviously not that the tech industry stopped it, but that the NIMBY+anti gentrification alliance stopped it. We can't even REBUILD los angeles or lahaina after fires burned down large swaths of urban areas.
The idea that tech should somehow also be responsible for remaking the face of America is silly when what commenters are calling "tech bros" (pejorative) run chip making, cloud tech, and advertising tech firms. In the 2010s any attempt to expand the footprint of the campuses themselves was met with SF/San Jose local derision. Egged busses. Screaming anti gentrification activists.
Google Fiber, being sold off now, had to negotiate with each municipality for almost a decade before any cable could be laid. IMO it's everyone else that needs to look inward here as to why the technology handed to other industries on a silver platter is not being effectively utilized to effectively rebuild the modern face of America.
I think the point of the piece is that the NIMBY + anti-gentrification alliance kept tech from booming as much as it could have which would have benefited Americans even more, not that the tech industry should have solved the problems of NIMBYism.
Back in the 2010’s there was a rise in assaults in Seattle’s gayborhood. They occurred primarily on a stretch that had a bunch of bars and occurred at night. Serious people claimed that this spike was tech bros beating people up for being gay. Writers at one of our alt weeklies (their archives are incomplete so I haven’t tried to fo d the articles) actually seriously made this claim and suggests that this was more likely than drunk people getting into fights or drunk people getting their phones stolen by opportunistic thieves. That was the point where I realized that a lot of the anti-tech people were seriously unhinged.
NIMBYs aren't stopping the rebuilding of Los Angeles. Well, as long as we rebuild it the way it was before. (And actually the residents of Pacific Palisades at least have a good argument for rebuilding it like it was before.)
Although it is funny to think of people objecting to the gentrification of Pacific Palisades.
I feel like this article’s thesis is fine about most topics but, written about SV, requires us to ignore that at least two, if not four, of the big players are just selling digital crack.
Miami property development and population boomed when their biggest businessmen were selling literal crack.
I feel like this criticism is largely disingenuous because while people levy this criticism at Zuckerburg, they never apply the inverse to Bezos or (especially) Musk.
Wait, what? People constantly criticize Musk for turning Xitter into a flaming Dumpster!
He also almost single-handidly made electric cars a thing in America.
...and Andreesen was one of the driving forces behind Netscape; at some point the whole "living long enough to become the villain " thing applies.
I have repeatedly pointed out, here, that the Kahnie hatred for Amazon and Tesla over Facebook and Xitter is completely fucking insane.
You may take your strawman and dynamite him somewhere else.
yeah it's pretty annoying.
"We hate tech bros like Mark Zuckerburg because his company makes things that are bad for the world!"
ok what about the guy who created Tesla?
"no we hate that guy even more"
I mean, folks hate Musk for reasons besides his products? Though Twitter as his product is also a reason? Hating some folks for producing bad shit and other folks for being gigantic fucking assholes is actually perfectly plausible, though I agree some people may phrase it badly or use one for cover of broader class complaints.
Ehh, Twitter and DOGE were pretty bad. And that being a Nazi thing.
Hard to imagine why people wouldn't like Musk.
Hate for Elon has nothing to do with Tesla and everything to do with his insane political behavior since ~2022. The dude literally elevated a conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi.
The Thai cave pedo thing came first, right? That was even crazier.
Oh yeah, wasn't that like fifty years ago? Definitely when I first started wondering what the hell was going on with this guy who was supposed to be cool.
The Thai thing was weird is that Musk's initial take was really ordinary.
It's a cliche that any white man living in Asia (especially Southeast Asia) is at best disreputable, and probably a deviant of some kind. It's a totally normal albeit tacky thing to joke about. Throw in a few shibboleths like "orientalism" and "colonizer" and it's plausibly even left-coded.
That still doesn't mean it's appropriate to direct it at a guy who's leading a rescue effort for stranded kids! But Musk was just being petty and childish rather than political. It's only when he doubled down and refused to apologize that he started to go in a weird political direction.
So… want to retract the accusation that my criticism is disingenuous?
Or are you gonna stick to that and just expect me to engage with you anyway?
oh for you no I think your criticism is totally legit.
My response was for the majority of anti-SV people who share your criticism of Musk for those reasons but also think Amazon, Tesla, etc. are bad. You seem intellectually consistent here.
Matt mentioned Star Trek: Picard but I'm doing through Star Trek: Discovery now and they've twice name-dropped Musk the same way they would name drop Hawking or Einstein. It's funny how different things were less than a decade ago.
The tech bros seem to be NIMBYs in general when it comes to their political priorities. They moved to Donald Trump as he was doubling down on NIMBYism in the 2024 election. There is a strong element of egalitarianism in YIMBY thought and practice that I don’t think they accept.
The tech bros as a whole were notoriously pro-Democrat donors for 15 years, and their widows/ex-wives still are. They've been Trump-leaning for what, 1-2 years? Let's wait a bit before passing judgment on the utility of a huge, fast-growing sector.
I mean, the death count from Musk's actions already seem to be in the hundreds of thousands due to USAID cuts. Usually you have to be a dictator to get numbers like that.
Blaming Silicon Valley for Elon seems like blaming the NYC real estate industry for Trump.
It's completely fine to blame the NYC real estate industry for Trump. They do have some responsibility for producing him and his dad.
Mark Burnett is the unsung villain of American history. If he hadn’t produced “The Apprentice,” would Trump have been successful as a POTUS candidate in 2016? More likely he would have flamed out and remained an asshole businessman/celebrity.
It's amazing how if you remove one or two reality shows from history, history turns out much better.
It’s funny, I had the exact same conversation on, IIRC, the VoteDem subreddit. It was “The Apprentice” which rescued Trump from “washed up 80’s period piece” to “decisive business mogul” and thence to “the non-politician who will drain the swamp, aka Donald the Dove.”
Mark Burnett IS the unsung villain of American history.
Is your theory here that The Apprentice boosted Trump's name recognition or that it bolstered the idea that Trump was some genius businessman?
The latter theory seems odd to me because I think Trump seemed like a total clown on The Apprentice.
Silicon Valley seems to be fine continuing to work closely w/ Elon after he supported policies that led to the deaths of thousands. Unlike Ukraine, they're not fighting for their lives.
I'm not blaming them (completely) for their support of him in 2016. But in 2026. Absolutely.
Most Americans seem to be fine with that. Why pick on SV?
Because they have money and power over the rest of us and are not politically accountable.
Yes?
Hot take: they should've stuck to being donors (to whomever they wished) and restricted their interactions with the regime to lobbying for their bottom line. No Melania movies, no DOGE, no gold Apple watches, just good old-fashioned lobbying and campaign cash.
Yes, well, there's something about Trump that makes everyone do weird, dumb stuff that they'll regret in 10 years. It's his superpower: bringing everyone down to his level.
ETTD (Everything Trump Touches Dies), as Rick Wilson said.
The cause and effect runs the other direction: the vast majority of tech people are still on the blue team, but after the blue team decided that tech people are villains some percentage of tech people eventually got sick of being hated on and switched to the red team.
I don't think this is true at all. There were large plans to develop the campuses and surrounding areas of San Jose in the 2010s that were effectively neutered by NIMBY / anti gentrification types. My co workers cars and buses were egged by angry SF leftists as they went to work for it. The calculus was more "not worth engaging with it"
The right wing has become more NIMBY but I don’t think it’s the techbro faction who’s behind that at all.
Andreeseen is specifically a NIMBY in Santa Clara County.
For those unfamiliar: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-famous-early-investment-facebook-113000502.html
Literally NIMBYism—America should build, just not in my backyard.
He's a NIMBY in San Mateo County actually. His NIMBY letter was to the city of Atherton, an exceedingly weathy city in San Mateo County. Still Silicon Valley though.
Exactly. Matt's point and Krugman's point are less separate than he suggests.
Did Tech bros support Trump? They are less openly opposed to Trump than they were in his first term and make deals with him, but I am sure Kamala won more tech billionaire votes than Trump and the same will be true in 2028.
I would not be sure of that at all. Multiple billionaires owning newspapers killed endorsements for Harris to curry favor with Trump.
Exactly my point they didn't endorse Trump.
They made sure not to endorse Harris. That was a clear intervention (that led to resignation of editors of newspapers) in support of Trump. It was a functional endorsement of Trump.
This is the billionaire version of voting for Jill Stein
And?
Are you under the delusion that newspaper endorsements in the 21st century have any particular vote changing utility?
Then why spike it? If it is so useless, what did Bezos have to worry about? He was worried, and he did spike it, so clearly it matters. He was afraid of Trump and bent the knee.
You might be introduced to the concept of business interests, costs and the like.
Then you might read a bit on the data of the past decades showing newspaper endorsements not being meaningful in at minimum Presidentials.
But I am sure nothing will change your righteous partisan frothing.
Not to say I support the idea of not-endorsing, but the reality is WP or La times endorsing or not Harris is not meaningful in reality. indeed overall in the 21st century the endorsements are not meaningful, they are archaisisms of a past era, largely of interest to the Pre Sold Partisan of whatever flavor to tout.
You might be introduced to the idea of a non-profit corporation. You might also be aware of the special role of media companies in both custom and law in democracies as crucial parts of the free press. If Bezos didn't want to preserve a free press, he was free not to buy the Washington Post. Again, just because it isn't always pleasant to own a newspaper doesn't mean one is free to abrogate the societal responsibility one has to defend a free press.
I think supporting a free press is part of our inheritance as Americans. Using terms like "righteous partisan frothing" suggests to me that you don't value a free press or having a democracy. I suggest you move to Russia where you can experience the lack of democracy and a free press free and clear where the oligarchs pursue only their business interests and costs.
I refer you to Abraham Lincoln, “As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
I would guess the average tech worker is a YIMBY while the founders / C-suite are more likely to be NIMBYs
I’m not sure about that. Most suburbs are quite NIMBY. Whether it’s tech employees showing up in town halls to protest against new construction, I don’t know for sure.
As a veteran of far too many public hearings in Silicon Valley where residents are shouting down housing, I can testify that it's not tech employees. It's boomer retirees.
Didn’t they wait until *after* the election to move to him?
No
This country needs a Manhattan project to develop San Fransokyo from Big Hero 6
Hamada is the Hiro we need, but don't deserve.
Underrated comment.
Libertarians have been about charter cities for awhile. Not sure these kind of cities are possible when you have all of a specific set of laws and policies that differentiate it, an openness to others moving in, and democracy.
It took a nuclear war with China for San Fransisco to redevelop in Star Trek.
LA half burned to the ground and Karen Bass mandated it be rebuilt with the same shitty McMansions it had before.
People who think Pacific Palisades should be rebuilt to be much denser really should go there and take a look around before opining. There's one road for entry and exit (Sunset Boulevard). People almost died trying to flee and when traffic came to a grinding halt many had to abandon their cars and make their way out on foot.
But, sure, let's double the population there.
I'm all for more and denser housing in LA but let's be realistic.
Roads are such a mysterious technology. Our ancestors built them but the secret was lost to time.
Topography is such an arcane mysterious science. Only those initiated in it learn that there are types of topography where building a road would be a really dumb thing to do.
https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-3tww18/Pacific-Palisades/?center=34.12734%2C-118.67137&zoom=11
Whether a road is stupid depends on what’s at either end. The worst topography between valuable locations is a no brainer and the easiest topography between two nowheres is the dumbest idea.
We’re not talking about anything that is fundamentally difficult like launching a spaceship to Alpha Centauri or counting the tulips on an alien world.
Not so true of Altadena though.
Yes, that is correct.
There was never a major fire like that in Los Angeles. There were two small neighborhoods that were significantly affected, but most of the city was not, and real estate prices have actually been falling over the past year and a half.
"real estate prices have actually been falling over the past year and a half."
Isn't this almost entirely due to interest rates being up and looking like they are going to stay up?
This is the time that interest rates have been declining.
I haven’t compared Los Angeles real estate to other cities in this past year (I’ve been looking at Los Angeles real estate myself) but I expected upward pressure from the fires, and yet it doesn’t seem to be as large as I had expected, probably because of how small these neighborhoods are compared to the urban area as a whole.
This wasn’t half the city being destroyed.
Agree on you later points that the area affected wasn't that large compared to the rest of LA. More that the reasons that prices have come down is that demand is softening. In large part because the actual costs of buying has gone up. I know a lot of places were sold with interest rate buy downs for the first couple of years, with the expectation that interest rates would drop and you could refinance then. I've seen less of those because interest rates don't seem like they will drop as much. So the 1% interest rate drop over the last year and half has been countered by rising long term expectations.
Or at least that has been my read on it. I could be way off! If you have other reasons you think the market is softening, I'd be interested.
I definitely don’t have other explanations! My main point was just that the neighborhoods affected by the fires were small enough that they don’t have much effect on the urban area as a whole, even in something as directly relevant as real estate prices.
The Bell Riots killed all the NIMBYs.
I was thinking a strike (metaphorically) to take down the supreme leaders (again, metaphorically) of marin county to spur development, but you are thinking big.
I understand Elon Musk visits the area from time to time, too (metaphorically)
Most of the major cities have been destroyed. There are few governments left. Six hundred million dead. No resistance.
No mention of how many fewer people tech employees than past major industries? For example Ford, once one of America's national champions, employs 390,000 people today. I'm not going to put into the time to look up how many people it employed in the 50s relative to the US population then, but I'm guessing 'a lot'? Meta by contrast has about 78,000 employees, and probably even fewer just in the US. OpenAI, maybe the most significant company in the world right now, has a little over 4000 employees. Less employees in the main industry means less city population overall
I am not an economist, but 60,000 software engineers making $180K with a Keynesian multiplier of 2 can support 360,000 teachers, auto mechanics, etc. making $60K (plus the occasional yacht merchant in Sausalito)
“with a Keynesian multiplier of 2 can support 360,000 teachers, auto mechanics, “
But they don’t actually need 360,000 of those as opposed to a boom with 300,000 industrial workers coming in, which is the problem.
Yeah, in the background of this entire article was "maybe all those extra people aren't there because they're surplus to requirements." It's as much a story about capital's dominance over labor as anything else.
I think you have to weigh the benefits of the tech boom with the costs of a lot of the new technology. Google and Meta destroyed the newspaper industry which is bad, social media is basically an unalloyed negative, tech bro politics is pretty awful (meritocracy fanaticism, dilettantism with a little bit of Randian sociopathy), Amazon is handy but also Bezos is a horrible human. Krugman is right to hate those people.
That’s interesting that you pick on Bezos as a horrible human. I don’t think of him as particularly bad in any way, unlike several of the others.
It's terrible what Bezos did to the Washington Post but damn it I like Amazon.
And what was the alternative for the Post? Being bought by David Ellison? Unfortunately, you need rich people to keep legacy media alive and there aren't too many good guys among the uber rich.
I don't think about these people in terms of good guys and bad guys, although there are some bad guys (looking at you, Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel). I just see guys responding predictably to incentives.
I mean, the Washington Post seemed to be doing fine pre-Bezos takeover. There are a lot of newspapers where you can say, 'dang, what can you do' but the Post weren't one of them!
Unironically, it could've been spun out as a non-profit (note I am not sure that'd be legally and financially possible but just as a pie in the sky thing) and be doing better now than under Bezos.
By “meritocracy fanaticism” of course we mean “continued to employ white men as software engineers even after we told them how gross that is.” I for one am grateful!
Nope, that’s not what that means at all.
Yeah, when the counterfactual is another country having the tech industry having SV here is positive, when the alternative is tech ending for good worldwide with UNIVAC I think we’d be fools for not choosing the second timeline. The internet has proven not just bad but insurmountably so. And billionaires are only good to the extent that their wealth recirculates
Idk, I like digital maps, MRIs, and mobile banking. Is there a third option where we keep technology but not social media? When people talk about how they hate technology or "the phones" that's usually what they have a problem with.
Hard to get one without the other, but sure.
I use GPS, but I sure am against it. Would be best to just force those with poor senses of direction (that is, most folks) into a subservient underclass.
The real problem is algorithmic social media. Like, old school 2009 Facebook where yes, people posted dumb political takes was fine. Not great, but a fairly minor negative.
Original Facebook was pretty great, I thought, but that cat is out of the bag.
You and I will be part of the priestly class, along with taxi and UPS drivers.
We’ll get to spot check random folks on the street to see if they know which way the cardinal directions are as a means of enforcing class membership
"Cardinal Directions" shhh brother, do not reveal the mysteries of the sacred texts to the masses huddled in ignorance.
As decidedly not keen as I was on having been born at all a world without the amazing technology I have access to is so much worse. It'd be like being born in a world without penicillin or radio.
I mean, but once you have a/c and antibiotics not much else is necessary. I would be ok with a priestly caste of healthcare workers and scientists that had access to tech for the purposes of medical breakthroughs so long as no one else could use it
May as well live in a cave like one of those rural barbarians.
There is a whole genre of videos of Europeans learning how much their American counterparts make. And before anyone starts ranting edit: France, as an example, have higher out of pocket medical costs than the US.
I don't know why so many struggle to understand that America is a richer country with a higher standard of living.
We have air conditioners and clothes dryers.
Because I've been told a million times by Bernie that 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. He must be right otherwise someone would have corrected him by now. /s
Out of pocket healthcare spending is higher in the US than Germany ($1472 per capita vs $944 per capita in 2024). Germany may spend more out of pocket as a percentage of total healthcare expenditures, but German healthcare expenditures are lower than the US.
The US is indeed a wealthier country.
That's a good point the $500 in healthcare savings doesn't make up for making $50k less.
Also $944 represents 2.1% of income. $1472 represents 1.7%. So Germans spend more of their income on out of pocket healthcare than the US.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025_8f9e3f98-en/full-report/financial-hardship-and-out-of-pocket-expenditure_4160e6d2.html
This is suggesting that Germany spends 2.5% of total household consumption OOP and the US 2.8%
The numbers I gave were PPP adjusted I think. So not sure the percentage calculation works exactly. But your overall point still stands
Where is the stat on the Germans’ higher OOP medical costs. That doesn’t pass the smell test
Edit: As noted above Germans spend 2.1% of their income on OOP healthcare expenses vs 1.7% for Americans.
This is all great, but there’s a bit of a confounding factor in a few of the comparisons. All US cities in 1880-1930 had much larger growth spurts than anything now could, just because that’s the era when rural people moved into cities, so even the cities that weren’t booming then grew quite a bit. Similarly for Chinese cities in 1980-2020.
The comparison to Houston and Jacksonville in recent decades is certainly apt, but those growth spurts are smaller than the ones mentioned for Chicago and Detroit or Shenzhen, and that’s the limit of what could have been expected here.
Right, China looks like it's doing things right because....they still had a massive amount of their people living as peasants in rural areas when I was alive and watching Ninja Turtles on Saturday mornings.
Not to mention that those rural and out of area people were moving to get unskilled/lower-skilled jobs in huge factories. What would be the equivalent in Silicon Valley?
They would be opening restaurants and barber shops and doing construction and driving buses and all the other jobs that exist in a growing metro area. “Selling shovels to the gold miners”, as it were.
That would be great, but not exactly the foundation for an economic boom.
And more likely I think it would mean that all the poor folks who have to make horrendous commutes to do these jobs would be able to live a lot closer, but maybe not *that* much else would change.
That actually *is* the foundation for an economic boom. A boom just is a lot more people getting paid more to do productive things. If real estate had been more plentiful, it would have benefited a lot more people, rather than just the people willing to do mega-commutes.
But there has to be some foundational industry that powers the rest of the boom, like autos in Detroit or transportation (and meatpacking) in Chicago. A denser SV would have a lot more people providing services to the rich employees in tech but that sounds more like Dubai than 20th century Detroit.
Bay Area is not lacking people who would do these things. The only issue I've faced is that plumbers/handymen are very hard to find on an urgent basis because they either live far away or are swamped with work.
It was recently pointed out that the booming cities of the South (Atlanta) and Southwest are actually reaching their limits no matter how much building they allowed since it was mostly all SFH and the commutes beyond the sprawl are untenable.
This essay does invite a few thoughts in response.
First, not all urban tech clusters are excluded from that growth chart. King WA (Seattle) and Travis TX (Austin) are very much tech agglomerations, and they are in the top 10.
But more importantly, the growth of tech means that jobs can be anywhere. Also, unlike industrial centers of the twentieth century, the apex of software requires very few developers. Meanwhile, other tech-related jobs that spring from software are free to locate anywhere. And so we see counties like Maricopa and Hillsborough (Tampa) FL on that list.
Those counties are home to a large number of middle and back office professionals - accountants, call centers, etc - that are enabled by tech to be in metro areas with low costs of living, low taxes, and aggressive pro-growth policies. Perhaps this distribution of relative prosperity might actually be a better outcome than cramped clustering in dense urban megacities. While this pattern does not spread the extreme wealth of the Bay Area, it does spread plenty of well-paying jobs around the country more so than in the industrial era.
This is exactly right. Tech billionaires exist because the marginal cost of that product is close to zero. And the production of those products looks completely different than the place centered world of manufacturing. Matt's argument is pretty bizarre.
You didn’t need to be employed in high finance to enjoy its spillover effects on life in New York. But you pretty much do need to work in tech to justify moving to San Francisco. That’s an important difference.
This is 2022 thinking. Silicon Valley has laid off or forcibly relocated almost everyone it hired in the US outside of its hubs (SF/SEA/NY). US hiring has slowed to a trickle and all of it is in the hubs. They’ll hire 500 people in a Bangalore or Hyderabad office before even one US remote.
Except that effect is not in any way linked to the United States. That effect has happened in every country. It doesn’t depend on being in the same country as the headquarters of the tech industry.