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I didn't read the book but that is entirely too simplistic and comes across as american exceptionalism to me. Not to mention the author has a well defined polit

I didn't read the book but that is entirely too simplistic and comes across as american exceptionalism to me. Not to mention the author has a well defined political agenda to sell I don't necessarily agree with. I've lived all over the country and all over the world and between countries I'd say it is 100% cultural. In "europe" employee protection laws make it difficult to quickly hire and fire employees, making it difficult to scale. In Chile failure was shameful. A stable bureaucratic government job was the most coveted job. In Japan you are a social outcast if you aren't a company man. I found quite a bit of entrepreneurial effort in west Africa, however I think that area lacks the required infrastructure to support large scale innovation. I don't buy the concentration argument within the US borders. The bay area has a population of 7M, the greater NYC area has a population of 20M. Purely based on population numbers it is difficult to believe the bay area has a higher concentration of educated people.

metamet 10y ago
> Purely based on population numbers it is difficult to believe the bay area has a higher concentration of educated people. At this point, I don't think it's arguing that. There's a critical mass of domain specific professionals in SV, pure and simple. The argument is that if anyone wants to create a competitor to SV, they'd be playing catch up because there is already an established core in SV. You'd need to peel away a large number of folks already established there before that concentration is no longer as strong as it currently is. There's a limited number of experts in the world. Wherever has the highest concentration is going to have an innate advantage in terms of appeal, regardless of cost, etc. Creating an affordable alternative elsewhere can't compete on that level.
yuhong 10y ago
>In "europe" employee protection laws make it difficult to quickly hire and fire employees, making it difficult to scale. And IMO US anti-discrimination laws are also flawed. I think a good compromise is to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws.
- npiazza83 10y ago
  How do you believe they are flawed? I hear this most often from people who have heard rumor or trash news from America and they think American companies have Affirmative Action "quotas" where they have to hire a certain number of people of each ethnic background. This is false. Though quotas have been outlawed in the United States, the European Union has had a recent push to punish companies whose boards aren't composed of at least 40% women. And India, Brazil and Malaysia, among other countries, have laws and policies that address affirmative action in schools and throughout society. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/business/global/18iht-boards18.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/business/global/18iht-boar... There are lots of anti-discrimination laws in the US. While affirmative action is usually spoken of in general terms, there is no singular policy or implementation of the ways in which affirmative action take shape in government organizations, colleges and corporations. It varies. Court cases continue to refine interpretations of how race is used at the university level. Some schools have experimented with a variety of ways of non-race-based models, like the Top 10 model that the University of Texas employs, to ensure the racial diversity of students. A 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung compared the effects of affirmative action on racial and special groups at three highly selective private research universities. The data from the study represent admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale): Whites (non-recruited athlete/non-legacy status): 0 (control group) Blacks: +230 Hispanics: +185 Asians: –50 Recruited athletes: +200 Legacies (children of alumni): +160 In 2009, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford, in their book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African Americans who got 1100. While the data and legal interpretation of Affirmative Action and anti-discrimination laws in the US are constantly changing today it has the largest real impact on Universities and Government.
  - yuhong 10y ago
    The problem is how these laws are enforced. For example, statistics and performance reviews are often used, which probably do work fine for manual labor jobs where employees are treated as a commodity (and for which these laws were probably originally designed for). Affirmative action BTW is not a good idea either, but not bad enough to outlaw IMO.

metamet 10y ago

> Purely based on population numbers it is difficult to believe the bay area has a higher concentration of educated people. At this point, I don't think it's arguing that. There's a critical mass of domain specific professionals in SV, pure and simple. The argument is that if anyone wants to create a competitor to SV, they'd be playing catch up because there is already an established core in SV. You'd need to peel away a large number of folks already established there before that concentration is no longer as strong as it currently is. There's a limited number of experts in the world. Wherever has the highest concentration is going to have an innate advantage in terms of appeal, regardless of cost, etc. Creating an affordable alternative elsewhere can't compete on that level.

yuhong 10y ago

>In "europe" employee protection laws make it difficult to quickly hire and fire employees, making it difficult to scale. And IMO US anti-discrimination laws are also flawed. I think a good compromise is to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws.

npiazza83 10y ago
How do you believe they are flawed? I hear this most often from people who have heard rumor or trash news from America and they think American companies have Affirmative Action "quotas" where they have to hire a certain number of people of each ethnic background. This is false. Though quotas have been outlawed in the United States, the European Union has had a recent push to punish companies whose boards aren't composed of at least 40% women. And India, Brazil and Malaysia, among other countries, have laws and policies that address affirmative action in schools and throughout society. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/business/global/18iht-boards18.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/business/global/18iht-boar... There are lots of anti-discrimination laws in the US. While affirmative action is usually spoken of in general terms, there is no singular policy or implementation of the ways in which affirmative action take shape in government organizations, colleges and corporations. It varies. Court cases continue to refine interpretations of how race is used at the university level. Some schools have experimented with a variety of ways of non-race-based models, like the Top 10 model that the University of Texas employs, to ensure the racial diversity of students. A 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung compared the effects of affirmative action on racial and special groups at three highly selective private research universities. The data from the study represent admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale): Whites (non-recruited athlete/non-legacy status): 0 (control group) Blacks: +230 Hispanics: +185 Asians: –50 Recruited athletes: +200 Legacies (children of alumni): +160 In 2009, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford, in their book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African Americans who got 1100. While the data and legal interpretation of Affirmative Action and anti-discrimination laws in the US are constantly changing today it has the largest real impact on Universities and Government.
- yuhong 10y ago
  The problem is how these laws are enforced. For example, statistics and performance reviews are often used, which probably do work fine for manual labor jobs where employees are treated as a commodity (and for which these laws were probably originally designed for). Affirmative action BTW is not a good idea either, but not bad enough to outlaw IMO.