Second world war pretty much made Europe much poorer than US. At the same time, Silicon valley a) was not wrecked by war b) had extravagant funding by US state c) had direct access to the (already then) remarkable US market.

So it's not just the current conditions, need to look at history as well.

And the marschal plan laid the basis for the German Wirtschaftswunder and made Germany the industrial powerhouse it was for quite a long time.

Italy is a really interesting case for me as the birthplace of the renaissance. What happened there? And when? For an interesting deep dive into the role of Government in innovation there is a report from Price-Waterhouse Cooper[1] that I found interesting if a bit jargon laden :-). But it definitely calls out for a public/private partnership to be successful.

I think governmental and banking stability has hurt Italy in this regard but I am certainly not an expert.

[1] https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/technology/pdf/how-governments-fos...

An important piece of context for the renaissance, which is often lost in modern discussions, is that it was not a movement which was attempting to be "innovative" or conceptualised itself as such. Rather, it was fundamentally backwards-looking: an attempt to recapture the glory of antiquity. People were digging up the ruins of a conspicuously more advanced civilisation -- which could do mind-bending things like draw in perspective, pour stone like liquid, and build vast spanning domes that lasted for millennia -- and wanted to reverse-engineer how those things were done. That was the genesis of the renaissance: reverse-engineering. Part of the reason Italy was the centre of this was because it had more tech to dig out of the ground.

Even the Enlightenment saw itself as largely backwards-loooking, again inspired by antiquity, this time in more philosophical terms. It's only since the industrial revolution that the framing has started to be more about "innovation towards the future" than "reclamation of past glory".

Afaik, the old civilizations were rather rudimentary in perspective? There are some traces of it, but no mind bending anything.

They had stuff like theatres, temples, and aqueducts that still stood after being utterly neglected for a millenium, whilst their fancy new churches took centuries to get built and needed constant maintenance. It’s easy to see how this would seem wonderful, or how they would take ancient Rome’s engineers and architects as models.

Also, we tend to take things we’re familiar with for granted, and overlook them when comparing different societies. So of course, ancient civilisations were terrible for other reasons, but still...

Roman artists used vanishing point perspective, which to medieval artists -- who had no grasp of perspective at all -- was pretty amazing. What the Romans didn't do was use vanishing points systematically -- they would have multiple contradictory vanishing points in a single image. Brunelleschi's invention of 3-point perspective was much more systematic than what the ancient world had done, but it was very much inspired by the desire to reverse-engineer Roman techniques.

Roman artists use of perspective is not really level that would be "mind blowing". Once in a while you got there little bit of it.

Medieval artists knew things far away are smaller, they did not knew all paralel lines have to go to one one point. But 3-point perspective is just another formal choice, simplification.

We have been trying to reverse engineer Roman cement for quite some time. There are quite a few things that past civilizations did that are impressive by today’s standards and then lost to time.

the Italian industrialization crisis case isn't that hard to crack: there are many factors leading to it, for sure, but the central choke point was the subdivision(=lottizzazione? I don't think subdivision really renders the term) of banks for local political interests.

the push from local industries to large conglomerates to global multinationals was sustained by a strong economy and easy access to large banking institution that could finance their operations at reasonable risk for themselves.

the small local banks in Italy could never sustain such a growth, and production remained local, with few notable exception.

sure politicking, corruption and mafia had a part in it, as they will reduce competitiveness of a company compared to others having none of such issues (i.e. the state deciding where to build factories based on unemployment and not efficiency) but a large enough company can absorb that in the bottom line and continue operating.

Medium companies are, however, completely suffocated from this.

the Italian startup stagnation is more confounding, but my personal belief is that it's likely a result of the absurd taxation the middle class gets. It's basically impossible to build up any saving to start entrepreneurship around here, as everything in welfare comes from the middle class. And existing entrepreneurs have little incentive in branching off to new unexplored areas. Without the fuel and ferment from solo founders making it, there's no culture and no substrate to fall into if a business fails. Everyone is just grabbing at their own chair, hoping not to be knocked into poverty by the next round of financial crises.

Thank you for this. It does sound like some systemic issues are at work here.

That said, this "my personal belief is that it's likely a result of the absurd taxation the middle class gets. It's basically impossible to build up any saving to start entrepreneurship around here" reminded me that many of the people who start new companies in the Bay Area have often accumulated a bit of wealth from the equity sale of the previous company they worked for.

For example, estimates vary on how many millionaires Facebook created when it went public and its stock value grew, on the low side it is a one to two thousand. Of those, over 200 according to Crunchbase have founded or co-founded new companies on their own. I'm more familiar with Sun Micro since I joined the day after they went public and was in the first 2000 employees. Of the 1999 that came before me, over half started new companies. At least 8 that I know of became general partners in VC firms that went on to fund hundreds a companies. There are also outliers like Eric Schmidt who got both the Sun boost, the Novell boost, and then the Google boost after that.

The point being that spreading out the success of a company widely is likely a big component as well.

I’ll also add the pitiful condition of the judiciary.

“Well then, sue me” is as middle-finger as it gets when quarreling with underhanded competitors or non compliant parties.

Getting justice - whatever that is, in Italy laws constantly change to favor whatever is the current favorite in power - is an such an excruciatingly long process that most will just give up and take the loss.

Corruption has to have an effect. In SV it's common to shout about the success of your business. It would probably be foolish to do the same in Italy.

likely, but I didn't see 'lack of corruption' in the parent post sv pillars, which is the whole point of the counterargument.

All the good engineers are working in Switzerland because of the money and the close proximity to home.

What about other labour laws? Isn't it hard to fire people in Italy, whereas CA has at-will? My friend whose father ran a well known cultural institution there also says organised crime is a problem, effectively an extra tax. Basically he was told he'd have to "hire" certain people, or else...

On top of other issues there's the fact that once SV is established somewhere, it turns into a magnet for all the new startups.

yeah Italy got it's problems, but it's a easy counter-example of what parent posts proposed as a thesis: that the secret ingredient was non-competes, education and climate.

it is readily apparent that the success pillar from silicon valley were not these three.

Since this was about the difference between US East and West coasts, I think the assumption was that the basic ability to be flexible economically would be the same. Obviously "not in the middle of a bitter civil war" is a pretty hard requirement as well, but nobody feels the need to mention that one either.

From what I can tell, Italian universities churn out some really great programmers, which mostly end up moving to other countries where it's easier for companies to actually run. Kind of a shame -- in addition to climate, Italy has food and history going for it as well.

In Italy you cannot fire anyone. Like a marriage. And taxes on wages are the highest in Europe. This is why they cannot easily compete globally.

which is all true, and further support the point that the three pillars pointed by parents (non competes, climate, colleges) are not the primary conditions for creating a silicon valley.

Inventions from centuries past notwithstanding, what universities does Italy have that are in the same league as Stanford and Wharton?

is going to be very hard to directly compare public and private universities.

alumni average results and achievements will vary a lot, because of open access, and population size and economic stagnation would screw other metrics like employment rate, wages etc. other metrics like staff size are pointless as well, unless maybe proportioned by participation over population size, and then one would need to carefully define what each university catchment region it.

That was in the context of the US. And Italy is a whole country, so the density is going to be different.

which is a fair point, but I don't see density as a key success factor in the parents comments.