Well the point is that the city should not be thought of as a business. Neoliberalism is a dead-end ideology that got us into today's mess.

Your views seem quite old-fashioned, neoliberal, maximising shareholder value. Both concepts that are increasingly under a lot of scrutiny as they seem to have failed to deliver on any of their promises for anyone apart from the super rich.

Therefore it should be thought of as a business. The city’s share holders are its inhabitants. It should run in such a way that it invests in the interests of the majority of its shareholders — its people. Courting potential companies that would bring in high wage earners will have knock on effects to the locals in the form of new commerce. It’s proven that one of the things that moves the whole demand curve to the right is an increase in population. But some of the “shareholders” are not as enfranchised as some others and this is where the city helps them cope with the new influx of capital and people. A city, run like a business, puts its people first and as such its people win. Excess revenues either get saved or distributed as a dividend aka a tax refund. Revenues aka taxes from both people and businesses pay for services that help the people. Etc etc.

I think it’s egocentric to make such a bold statement as my analogy is patently false because populism is increasing and the wealth creators are being attacked.

The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences -- setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio -- then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That's not, by the way, to say that there aren't huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it's not inherently wrecked; it's just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That's not on your balance sheet, that's on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that's hard and it's messy, and we're building up legacy systems that we can't just blow up.