The Valley and the Highway · The Economy That Keeps Becoming, Chapter Five
Description
At the start of the 1980s there were two places in the United States that a reasonable observer would have named as the centres of the electronics industry. One was the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco, which had been called Silicon Valley for about a decade. The other was the ring of suburbs around Boston strung along Route 128, a highway built in the 1950s, where a cluster of minicomputer makers had grown out of the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the military research of the Second World War. On most measures an investor would have used at the time, the Boston region looked at least as strong as the Valley. It had older universities, deeper pools of engineering talent, established firms with famous names (Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General, Wang Laboratories, Prime Computer) and a record of turning research into products. Both regions had grown on defence contracts. Both had access to venture capital. Both were full of very able people.
Chapter Five of The Economy That Keeps Becoming: Complexity Economics, Read as a Living System, for Leaders and Households, by Ammanuel Santa Anna (Luminous Prosperity Inc., 2026). The chapter is deposited on its own and as part of the book.
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References
- Gilson, R. J. (1999). The legal infrastructure of high technology industrial districts: Silicon Valley, Route 128, and covenants not to compete. New York University Law Review, 74(3), 575–629. A legal and economic argument proposing one contributing mechanism; it is not an empirical test, and later studies of non-compete enforcement have reached mixed conclusions not reviewed here. No DOI is registered.
- Krugman, P. (1991). Increasing returns and economic geography. Journal of Political Economy, 99(3), 483–499. https://doi.org/10.1086/261763