- stable health insurance and medical coverage.
- economy big & stable enough that when one job is lost, another can be found without substantial financial injury.
- geographically dense and large network of innovative people (this requires a good university - or two).
Essentially you need a place where you can take risks and fail without causing a total life crisis. that is why SV started as a thing: fruit farms with cheap land. Universities were nearby and the Cold War was in full force: a lot of funding was present. The interaction of knowledgeable people is a huge support base for increased research and innovation.
Do you know what else is within 300 miles of Cleveland Ohio?
Absolutely nothing.
~50 million people live within 300 miles of Cleveland vs about ~16 million within 300 miles of SF.
All of these are about 400 miles away, some less than 300.
And did you edit your comment, because I think it originally said 500 miles.
I grew up in Akron, the former Rubber Capital of the World. There is literally nothing in Northeast Ohio but cornfields, soybeans, brutal winters, and rusting artifacts of the 20th century economy. Columbus could be a good choice for growing tech firms to add a second HQ due to OSU being a pretty decent school, but Cleveland really has nothing going for it. The geographical advantages that led to it's existence and growth during the industrial revolution have gone and will never return.
You are still speaking a bit too strongly though. There is plenty of things in NEO. For starts world class museums and cultural institutions (having been rich in the past helps).I'm living in San Francisco right now, but I could definitely see myself going back someday
http://aqicn.org/map/northamerica/
And compare to:
The size of the US federal budget has only gone in one direction regardless of which party was in power, and it hasn't been to get smaller. And they keep passing anti-startup garbage like FOSTA or the incredible bureaucracy that de facto prohibits small businesses from participating in the finance or medical industries. These are not libertarian policies.
The problem is they're spending trillions on unnecessary wars and buying the elderly vote with outrageously expensive program expansions, and then there is nothing left -- less than nothing, since it's all debt-financed -- to fund the actually-beneficial (and much less expensive) programs that you're asking for.
This is a good thing. These areas are not places where you want to "move fast and break things."
Nobody wants anybody to "move fast and break things":
That was the motto of one jerk who nobody likes, who incidentally runs a multi-billion dollar company and not a small business, whose company has since disavowed it, and is in general not how small businesses actually operate.
You don't want doctors to "move fast and break things" but you also don't want them to spend 95% of their time filling out paperwork so that medicine becomes so expensive that people go untreated because they can't afford it, or it bankrupts the government.
You don't want Nazi experiments but you do want a cure for cancer. There is a trade off here. If you choose wrong people die, no matter which wrong you choose. Which is why the correct solution has more to do with informed consent and less to do with massive regulatory burdens that exclude small entities, increase costs and deter participation.
The Iraq war had significant buy-in from (some now mainstream) libertarian writers and thinkers. For example, Megan McArdle, under the name "Jane Galt", wrote feverishly in favor of the war on terror and mocked those who opposed it. The libertarian argument was that by toppling dictatorships and theocracies, these "liberated" middle-eastern democracies would all have liberalized economies.
I don't want to single out libertarians here though, I just want to point out interventionist policies have widespread support in the United States across the political spectrum (after all "even the liberal New Republic" supported it) and I don't see that trend reversing any time soon.
Identifying someone who claims to support an idea and then makes an argument inconsistent with that idea is a valid criticism of the person and their bad argument, not of the original idea.
> I don't want to single out libertarians here though, I just want to point out interventionist policies have widespread support in the United States across the political spectrum (after all "even the liberal New Republic" supported it)
Sure, right after 9/11 when everybody was angry. Angry makes for irrational. Maybe it's time to revisit a lot of that stuff and roll it back.
> and I don't see that trend reversing any time soon.
The public is made up of people. Things change when somebody changes them.
Yup, all correct. I say this with the slight bias of a dual national, but if you want a glimpse into the future that current US policy gets you, look at Italy. And then keep in mind that Italy still provides education and healthcare.
EDIT: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. I didn't make this comment to be inflammatory, moreso to point out that our policy promotes wealth concentration and erodes middle class opportunities. I'm not suggesting that libertarian policies are a solution, nor that the US has adopted them. Just saying that the Italian regulatory environment favors incumbents and that my take is that we're headed in that direction as well via corporate capture. Italy's not a disaster - it's still the 9th largest economy in the world - but it certainly doesn't live up to its potential following its post-war boom.
This has been absurdly obvious for about 3-5 years now. The knowledge of actual hardware creation & manufacturing has largely migrated to China (hello outsourcing). Costs of living in reasonably stable environments (required for broad innovation) in the US is absurdly high. Government support and funding for innovation - which is required for high value research - has been gutted since the Cold War. These things have a long-term effect.
All of the above are USA policies driven by politics. They can all be 100% fixed with political muscle and will. Much like our infrastructure. We can fix it: we choose not to.
China's government is not stupid; they can watch the US hamstring itself via libertarian policies and work to avoid such approaches. I don't like their approach to human rights, but they are working very hard to fund innovation and infrastructure.