6 ms·

SV relies on dense loci of talent in order to function, Chicago is really the only city that has this. The melting pot of ideas, poaching, engineering etc is a

SV relies on dense loci of talent in order to function, Chicago is really the only city that has this. The melting pot of ideas, poaching, engineering etc is a huge reason for its success. While I understand SV is looking increasingly unattractive for cheap big bets, I don't think this will play out like these firms expect. It's not about the money, it's about the culture that SV cultivated. And while parts of it are toxic, other parts of it are enormously successful and notoriously hard to replicate. It also doesn't help that every state in the midwest has been slashing educational budgets and in some states has enacted almost a war on education. I think the attitude of "SV toxic culture" is ironic, after having grown up in the midwest and seen horrible racism, anti-intellecutalism, anti-free speech measures, and all others kinds of issues.

lsc 9y ago
>It also doesn't help that every state in the midwest has been slashing educational budgets and in some states has enacted almost a war on education. Yeah, uh, this is going to end badly; I left the central valley for the anti-intellectual culture. It's a long term problem, and I don't really see how you combat it. Educational funding, I think, might even be a trailing indicator of this; If your culture doesn't value learning... you have a much bigger problem than just underfunded schools.
- jeron 9y ago
  Making higher education free would be a great start, but that's probably not happening anytime soon
  - lsc 9y ago
    My argument is that not valuing education (as evinced by an unwillingness to spend public money on it) is an even bigger problem than the actual lack of money for education, though that is also certainly a problem.
    - rdiddly 9y ago
      Where there's no will, there's no way...
  - newbear 9y ago
    I can get a better education from Moocs than I did from my tenured mathematics professor who didn’t know the applications of linear algebra in the real world.
    - lsc 9y ago
      Would you ask your Literature professor what the real world applications of reading Joseph Conrad are? I think asking for a 'real world application' of something you are learning in the course of a liberal education is missing the point. Trade schools are a different sort of thing.
      - tdb7893 9y ago
        For an engineering discipline getting a college degree is almost always a requirement for getting a real job. This means that practically for a lot of people college is largely intended to be training for their job, so it makes sense why they get frustrated when it doesn't actually train them for it. To pull my personal experience in college was frustrating because I didn't feel like I had much control over what I wanted to learn because college had their idea of a "liberal education" (which didn't match up with mine) and in a modern job market I had little choice but to attend.
        lsc 9y ago
        If you mean like a licenced engineer, a PE or something, then sure, a degree is required. But if you mean someone in the computer industry, as the word is usually used in these parts? A degree is a substitute for a few years of experience, If you can learn the Material in question.
  - smashingfiasco 9y ago
    Higher education is turning more and more into over-priced crap. I’m not sure that this is the solution.
  - redspectre 9y ago
    There's no free lunch. You're paying for it.
    - lsc 9y ago
      I personally place public education up there with an army and cops as things I really want my society to have. Yeah, all those things cost money... but not nearly as much as not having those things will cost you in the long run.
- jorblumesea 9y ago
  Same here. I grew up in the midwest and left it for political reasons. While I do detest the progressive echo chamber, the alternative seems to be far worse in many ways. Under the veneer of charming and can do spirit lies an under current of some of the worst America has to offer. Opposition to freedom of speech, opposition to education and free thought, racism... the list goes on. I think this article just shows how little these VC West coasters know about the midwest.
  - lsc 9y ago
    I'm not sure it's really even a political problem, except to the extent that all values problems are political problems. It's just that if your kids get beat up for being good at math... well, your society is going to fall behind.
    - jorblumesea 9y ago
      That is inherently a political problem, in my eyes. Politics and culture are intertwined. The culture of the region has to change, but it's unclear if anyone really wants to change. Maybe when the money is attached to being studious things might be different. Sadly the midwest sees education and educated people as at best, an inconvenience, and at worst, a threat.
      - smashingfiasco 9y ago
        The Midwest sees educated people as an inconvenience or a threat? Goddamn. Where did you get that idea from? Clearly you have no idea what you’re talking about. The problem is that it’s stagnanted over here. NAFTA destroyed the way of life for a lot of mid-westneners. Made people poor. Made want. Destroyed the mechanisms, the entry level, manual jobs, that people used to pull themselves up by. Municipalities got into a vicious cycle of loss of tax base feeding into loss of services feeding into even more loss of tax base. For starters, to get an idea of what’s going on over here, I’d recommend you watch both Detropia and Flint Town. Get a little taste of reality and see the people you’re trying to crap on. Everyone here, everyone sees that value and importance of education. Every parent, even in the most down-trodden neighborhoods with the worst schools, wants this for their children. Again, loss of tax base, loss of jobs, increased violence. Assuming you live on one of the coasts, you’ll get yours. Just wait until the underfunded pension systems finally blow. Can’t believe I just read such a level idiocy on HN.
- TangoTrotFox 9y ago
  I think this point is something that's often missed in the political dogma on education. At least by PISA scores many of the countries now beating us spend substantially less on education than we do. For instance Vietnam is now ahead of the US in math and science. In fact, they're 8th in the world in science. Their purchasing power parity GDP/capita is $6,925 ($2,305 nominal) and a total of 6.6% of that goes to education. That's $450/capita, parity compensated. In the US we spend 5.6% of $61,687 per capita which is $3455/capita - north of 700% greater than Vietnam's spending, parity adjusted. You can't just spend your way to people valuing and embracing education. - [1] Convenient listing of the 2015 PISA results - [2] List of nations by percent of GDP spent on education, one click away from conversion to parity adjusted $/capita [1] - http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-math-science-reading-skills-2016-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-mat... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_on_education_%28%25_of_GDP%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...
sjg007 9y ago
The issue is that millenials are getting married -and having kids so SV is too expensive. You can build tech elsewhere.
refurb 9y ago
The mid-west might be slashing educational budgets, but it's a hell of a lot easier to find a high quality school than it is in SF.
haberman 9y ago
> It also doesn't help that every state in the midwest has been slashing educational budgets and in some states has enacted almost a war on education. I looked up some information for my home state (Iowa) and the opposite seems to be true, at least for K-12. This study shows per-capita increases in K-12 education 2008-2015 in North Dakota, Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Minnesota, while finding decreases in New Jersey, New York, Delaware, and California. https://www.cbpp.org/total-state-k-12-funding-below-2008-levels-in-most-states-0 https://www.cbpp.org/total-state-k-12-funding-below-2008-lev... Perhaps you meant higher education? Iowa does seem to be making cuts there: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2017/04/11/iowa-legislature-weighs-more-cuts-education-spending/100339576/ https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2017/0...
- dnomad 9y ago
  Looking at simple percentage deltas is rather misleading. It's important to understand the context and the causes behind those numbers. In Kansas, for example, education funding has been deeply cut in non-obvious ways. It's so bad that the State Supreme Court has been forced to intervene and declare the current funding of the schools to be unconstitutional! [1][2] (Think about that for a second -- these are highly conservative judges, not "activist judges," deploying the logic of civil rights on behalf of school children.) The same problem pervades the Midwest -- except Minnesota. (Minnesota is very unique in the Midwest for actually investing in education and producing high levels of educational attainment [3][4].) The end result is that no matter how cheap the land or low the taxes operating and growing a knowledge-driven business in much of the Midwest is a really a non-starter. [1] http://kcur.org/post/5-reasons-kansas-supreme-court-found-state-s-school-funding-unconstitutional#stream/0 http://kcur.org/post/5-reasons-kansas-supreme-court-found-st... [2] http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article176606731.html http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article17... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/right-vs-left-in-the-midwest.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/right-vs-le... [4] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-03-02/minnesota-ranks-no-3-among-best-states https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-03-02/...
  - 9y ago
xivzgrev 9y ago
I just moved from Chicago. It has nowhere near the density of jobs, talent, or funding SV does.
- phil21 9y ago
  I think the point was it's the only place in the midwest that could even be remotely considered in the same sentence for those properties. Other midwestern cities are large suburbs in comparison.
aphextron 9y ago
>It also doesn't help that every state in the midwest has been slashing educational budgets and in some states has enacted almost a war on education. I think the attitude of "SV toxic culture" is ironic, after having grown up in the midwest and seen horrible racism, anti-intellecutalism, anti-free speech measures, and all others kinds of issues. Well you have to understand that when people say they are looking for more "diversity of thought" they really mean "people who think like me".
quotemstr 9y ago
Some of the smartest people I've met grew up in the midwest. Your comment is part of the problem: it paints a large, diverse region with a single derogatory brush, and it additionally hints that everyone who disagrees with the standard bay area political perspective must be uneducated, if not outright malicious. This kind of thinking is what these VCs are trying to escape.
- sjg007 9y ago
  Silicon Valley is basically full of midwestern millennials engineers.. If that doesn't show the value of the midwest, then I don't know what would.
IntronExon 9y ago
Emphasis on “dense” and “pot” especially, and the culture in SV is more Petri dish than anything else. It is demonstrably all about the money, and then getting the fuck out.

lsc 9y ago

>It also doesn't help that every state in the midwest has been slashing educational budgets and in some states has enacted almost a war on education. Yeah, uh, this is going to end badly; I left the central valley for the anti-intellectual culture. It's a long term problem, and I don't really see how you combat it. Educational funding, I think, might even be a trailing indicator of this; If your culture doesn't value learning... you have a much bigger problem than just underfunded schools.

jeron 9y ago
Making higher education free would be a great start, but that's probably not happening anytime soon
- lsc 9y ago
  My argument is that not valuing education (as evinced by an unwillingness to spend public money on it) is an even bigger problem than the actual lack of money for education, though that is also certainly a problem.
  - rdiddly 9y ago
    Where there's no will, there's no way...
- newbear 9y ago
  I can get a better education from Moocs than I did from my tenured mathematics professor who didn’t know the applications of linear algebra in the real world.
  - lsc 9y ago
    Would you ask your Literature professor what the real world applications of reading Joseph Conrad are? I think asking for a 'real world application' of something you are learning in the course of a liberal education is missing the point. Trade schools are a different sort of thing.
    - tdb7893 9y ago
      For an engineering discipline getting a college degree is almost always a requirement for getting a real job. This means that practically for a lot of people college is largely intended to be training for their job, so it makes sense why they get frustrated when it doesn't actually train them for it. To pull my personal experience in college was frustrating because I didn't feel like I had much control over what I wanted to learn because college had their idea of a "liberal education" (which didn't match up with mine) and in a modern job market I had little choice but to attend.
      - lsc 9y ago
        If you mean like a licenced engineer, a PE or something, then sure, a degree is required. But if you mean someone in the computer industry, as the word is usually used in these parts? A degree is a substitute for a few years of experience, If you can learn the Material in question.
- smashingfiasco 9y ago
  Higher education is turning more and more into over-priced crap. I’m not sure that this is the solution.
- redspectre 9y ago
  There's no free lunch. You're paying for it.
  - lsc 9y ago
    I personally place public education up there with an army and cops as things I really want my society to have. Yeah, all those things cost money... but not nearly as much as not having those things will cost you in the long run.
jorblumesea 9y ago
Same here. I grew up in the midwest and left it for political reasons. While I do detest the progressive echo chamber, the alternative seems to be far worse in many ways. Under the veneer of charming and can do spirit lies an under current of some of the worst America has to offer. Opposition to freedom of speech, opposition to education and free thought, racism... the list goes on. I think this article just shows how little these VC West coasters know about the midwest.
- lsc 9y ago
  I'm not sure it's really even a political problem, except to the extent that all values problems are political problems. It's just that if your kids get beat up for being good at math... well, your society is going to fall behind.
  - jorblumesea 9y ago
    That is inherently a political problem, in my eyes. Politics and culture are intertwined. The culture of the region has to change, but it's unclear if anyone really wants to change. Maybe when the money is attached to being studious things might be different. Sadly the midwest sees education and educated people as at best, an inconvenience, and at worst, a threat.
    - smashingfiasco 9y ago
      The Midwest sees educated people as an inconvenience or a threat? Goddamn. Where did you get that idea from? Clearly you have no idea what you’re talking about. The problem is that it’s stagnanted over here. NAFTA destroyed the way of life for a lot of mid-westneners. Made people poor. Made want. Destroyed the mechanisms, the entry level, manual jobs, that people used to pull themselves up by. Municipalities got into a vicious cycle of loss of tax base feeding into loss of services feeding into even more loss of tax base. For starters, to get an idea of what’s going on over here, I’d recommend you watch both Detropia and Flint Town. Get a little taste of reality and see the people you’re trying to crap on. Everyone here, everyone sees that value and importance of education. Every parent, even in the most down-trodden neighborhoods with the worst schools, wants this for their children. Again, loss of tax base, loss of jobs, increased violence. Assuming you live on one of the coasts, you’ll get yours. Just wait until the underfunded pension systems finally blow. Can’t believe I just read such a level idiocy on HN.
TangoTrotFox 9y ago
I think this point is something that's often missed in the political dogma on education. At least by PISA scores many of the countries now beating us spend substantially less on education than we do. For instance Vietnam is now ahead of the US in math and science. In fact, they're 8th in the world in science. Their purchasing power parity GDP/capita is $6,925 ($2,305 nominal) and a total of 6.6% of that goes to education. That's $450/capita, parity compensated. In the US we spend 5.6% of $61,687 per capita which is $3455/capita - north of 700% greater than Vietnam's spending, parity adjusted. You can't just spend your way to people valuing and embracing education. - [1] Convenient listing of the 2015 PISA results - [2] List of nations by percent of GDP spent on education, one click away from conversion to parity adjusted $/capita [1] - http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-math-science-reading-skills-2016-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-mat... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_on_education_%28%25_of_GDP%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...

sjg007 9y ago

The issue is that millenials are getting married -and having kids so SV is too expensive. You can build tech elsewhere.

refurb 9y ago

The mid-west might be slashing educational budgets, but it's a hell of a lot easier to find a high quality school than it is in SF.

haberman 9y ago

> It also doesn't help that every state in the midwest has been slashing educational budgets and in some states has enacted almost a war on education. I looked up some information for my home state (Iowa) and the opposite seems to be true, at least for K-12. This study shows per-capita increases in K-12 education 2008-2015 in North Dakota, Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Minnesota, while finding decreases in New Jersey, New York, Delaware, and California. https://www.cbpp.org/total-state-k-12-funding-below-2008-levels-in-most-states-0 https://www.cbpp.org/total-state-k-12-funding-below-2008-lev... Perhaps you meant higher education? Iowa does seem to be making cuts there: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2017/04/11/iowa-legislature-weighs-more-cuts-education-spending/100339576/ https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2017/0...

dnomad 9y ago
Looking at simple percentage deltas is rather misleading. It's important to understand the context and the causes behind those numbers. In Kansas, for example, education funding has been deeply cut in non-obvious ways. It's so bad that the State Supreme Court has been forced to intervene and declare the current funding of the schools to be unconstitutional! [1][2] (Think about that for a second -- these are highly conservative judges, not "activist judges," deploying the logic of civil rights on behalf of school children.) The same problem pervades the Midwest -- except Minnesota. (Minnesota is very unique in the Midwest for actually investing in education and producing high levels of educational attainment [3][4].) The end result is that no matter how cheap the land or low the taxes operating and growing a knowledge-driven business in much of the Midwest is a really a non-starter. [1] http://kcur.org/post/5-reasons-kansas-supreme-court-found-state-s-school-funding-unconstitutional#stream/0 http://kcur.org/post/5-reasons-kansas-supreme-court-found-st... [2] http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article176606731.html http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article17... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/right-vs-left-in-the-midwest.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/right-vs-le... [4] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-03-02/minnesota-ranks-no-3-among-best-states https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-03-02/...
- 9y ago

xivzgrev 9y ago

I just moved from Chicago. It has nowhere near the density of jobs, talent, or funding SV does.

phil21 9y ago
I think the point was it's the only place in the midwest that could even be remotely considered in the same sentence for those properties. Other midwestern cities are large suburbs in comparison.

aphextron 9y ago

>It also doesn't help that every state in the midwest has been slashing educational budgets and in some states has enacted almost a war on education. I think the attitude of "SV toxic culture" is ironic, after having grown up in the midwest and seen horrible racism, anti-intellecutalism, anti-free speech measures, and all others kinds of issues. Well you have to understand that when people say they are looking for more "diversity of thought" they really mean "people who think like me".

quotemstr 9y ago

Some of the smartest people I've met grew up in the midwest. Your comment is part of the problem: it paints a large, diverse region with a single derogatory brush, and it additionally hints that everyone who disagrees with the standard bay area political perspective must be uneducated, if not outright malicious. This kind of thinking is what these VCs are trying to escape.

sjg007 9y ago
Silicon Valley is basically full of midwestern millennials engineers.. If that doesn't show the value of the midwest, then I don't know what would.

IntronExon 9y ago

Emphasis on “dense” and “pot” especially, and the culture in SV is more Petri dish than anything else. It is demonstrably all about the money, and then getting the fuck out.