Comment by TheOtherHobbes
21 hours ago
It's very localised and Californian. There were really two big tech scenes - one around MIT and Mass, and one around CalTech/Stanford and adjacent areas - with some also-rans in other areas that were mostly gov mil/aerospace spinoffs.
The Mass scene sort of fizzled in the 90s for various reasons - not dead, but not dominant - and the centre of gravity moved to the West Coast.
So if you were born in CA and studied there - and Atkinson did both - your odds of hitching your wagon to a success story were higher than if you were born in Montana or Dublin.
This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in fact it's a major inefficiency because it's a severe physical and cultural constraint on opportunity. It's not that other places lack talented people, it's that the networks are highly localised, the culture is very standardised - far less creative than it used to be, and still pretends to be - and diverse ideas and talent are wasted on an industrial scale.
FWIW CalTech is in southern California and far away (both geographically and socially) from Stanford. Its strengths also tend to be primarily in physics, rocketry, and astronomy, rather than in CS - its primary ties are with JPL and NASA. The Bay Area tech scene is anchored by Stanford and UC Berkeley, though most Stanford alums would probably say it's just Stanford.
He probably meant Berkeley.
There's probably a book in there. The CA axis was probably Stanford/Berkeley with Caltech relatively small and in another part of the state and probably much more theoretical in focus.
Don't really buy Levy's thesis of the migration from east to west and Stallman as "the last hacker" hasn't aged well.
But Boston/Cambridge (really Massachusetts generally) did sort of empty out of a lot of tech for a time as minicomputer companies declined and Silicon Valley became the scene. I actually decided not to go that direction because, at the time in the nineties, it would have been a relative cost of living downgrade.
You said it yourself - universities are the major hubs that bring talented driven people together and provide access to some of the greatest teachers and researchers and other resources. MIT and Stanford are special, somehow, in this regard.
You see this as inefficient and maybe you’re right. I think about how little it has cost to run these schools compared to the wealth (financial, cultural, technological) they spin off and to me it looks very efficient.
> This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in fact it's a major inefficiency because it's a severe physical and cultural constraint on opportunity.
I don't think social relationships and their geography are a particular characteristic of capitalism - let alone US-specific capitalism.
They - and the resulting hub/centralization effects - predate it by millennia. There is no shortage of historical cities or state that became major hubs for certain industries or research. How much of the effort in those places is "wasted" seems hard to quantify in an objective way, but again, the pattern of low-hanging fruit being more available to the first wave and then a lot of smart, hard-working people in the future generations working more around the edges is not capitalism-exclusive.
Huh? Caltech/Stanford? These are two different tech scenes.