* I always feel like saying to the mainstream press, it’s the demographics, stupid. I could have written a better article just using about 5 sentences. Of course, that wouldn’t fill the space, but still.
* In other words, “Keep Portland weird… and white.”
* San Francisco grew up as a port even if LA is now a much bigger one and San Francisco’s moribund. That is why SF was the biggest city on the West Coast until the early 20th century. Prior to Silicon Valley, SF was also the financial capital of the West. Wells Fargo and Bank of America had their headquarters in SF. The nascent Silicon Valley was another world from SF, 50 miles down the peninsula. That owed more to Stanford University being the epicenter of electronic research. The big money in California in the 60′s and 70′s was in real estate development and finance. In fact, the FIRE economy pushed out blue collar workers and industry from San Francisco and its nearby suburbs and now the Tech economy is driving the FIRE industry out. Bank of America, e.g., no longer owns its signature building in downtown SF and is headquartered in Charlotte.
I suspect Nolan Bushnell might be the true father of San Francisco’s current position as a tech capital. Atari made computer technology into a consumer good and both Jobs and Wozniak got their start working for Atari. Once computer technology became cheap enough and user friendly enough for everyday use the money poured into Silicon Valley. In a world were twenty something Yahoo entrepreneurs could make hundreds of millions of dollars and cellphone applications became billion dollar unicorn companies the idea of living in Milpitas when you could afford Pacific Heights didn’t make much sense.
* I do find it interesting now that California’s three most prominent office holders are Bay Area residents: Jerry Brown (Oakland), Feinstein (SF), and Boxer (Marin County). From what I see, the odds on favorite to replace Boxer in the Senate is state AG Kamala Harris (San Francisco), the only “Republican” who was ever said to have a prayer was Condoleezza Rice (Stanford/SV).
And the reason why NorCal is wiping the floor with SoCal is that MIT will always beat Guatemala.
* Steve’s point is that closeted-race-realist limousine liberalism made SF turn into MIT, whereas whatever they had in LA had it turn to Guatemala.
* I wonder what Joel Kotkin thinks of this analysis. He championed immigration at the beginning of his career but I sense he had gradually shifted his opinion without coming out and actually saying so.
* I grew up in San Diego Co. My family was there because of the defense industry, and all of my childhood friends’ fathers worked for GD, GA, M/A comm, SAIC, or the biotech firms, if they weren’t outright Navy or Marines.
The defense industry crowd is what propelled UCSD to bring the second best engineering school in the UC system, above UCLA.
The engineers in those companies were all transplants from the Midwest, with high hopes for their own kids. But something about San Diego killed it for their kids. Their own kids wanted to be surfers and stoners, and culture was anti work and anti intellectual. Masters and PhD holding parents were becoming okay with their kids bumming it at SDSU or surfing.
Then the Berlin Wall collapse defense industry recession hit hard, and LA lost its aero industry, and San Diego survived because of cell phones and what became Qualcomm. But the culture wasn’t there for young twenty somethings who were nerdy because it was still overwhelmingly for stoners and surfers.
The bay area did attract them. They were attracted to Apple, Oracle, Cisco and a hundred semi conductor manufacturers.
Meanwhile, the nerds hated Hollywood. And after the aero collapse, LA became just a media industry town, and nerds couldn’t compete with glitz and self promotion. Young people in LA were all writing their own screenplay. Nerds wanted to get away.
* Stanford and Harvard have generated a lot more computer billionaires than Cal Tech (strict merit, no AA) and MIT (subdued AA compared to other top schools).
It seems that the Cal Tech policy of filling the class with the highest possible non-verbal IQ does not produce software entrepreneurs like Harvard and Stanford’s “mix of the smartest and richest, together with athletes and leaders with very high IQ.”
* I wonder what the average IQ is in the Bay Area. I suspect that for an area of its size it has by far the smartest population in the US, and probably the world. If the nationwide average is ~100, then the Bay has to be at least, what, 110?
* An aunt of mine and her husband, he with a doctorate, she with a masters, had four children and lived right on the beach in a place called Capistrano Beach, one of the early gated communities.When I say “right on the beach” I mean you stepped out of the house and on to the beach, where the breakers and the pristine sand stretched out for miles in either direction.
Result: beach bum boys, not one of whom graduated from college (well, one did, but only after he realised in his mid-twenties that otherwise his already growing family was going to starve). Another was still surfing nearly full time at age 40. They were not stupid: the graduate was tested with a 150 IQ, and the surfer is a very articulate and very amusing conversationalist.
What was it? The fatal pull of the sun, the sea and the sky I suppose.
I was lucky in at least two ways: It all meant nothing to me, and I grew up in Palo Alto.
* Steve, have you seen the NY Times Mag “Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield” piece yet? It’s insane — like the Frankfurt-School-Sinatra-Has-A-Cold of IQ denialism, ableism, molestation hysteria, real molestation under color of “science,” pseudo-medico-novelty obsession, and crazy PhD’s gone wild; it’s like the Citizen Kane of irreplicability, man.
* I’ve lived in both locations. I think overall SoCal is a nicer place to live, but I admit there are times when I travel to SF that it feels as if I’m entering civilization. But that’s probably largely because it’s an older city with top restaurants, boutiques, etc.
And don’t forget all the surf/skate/clothing/car/motorcycle start-ups in SoCal, especially in OC. There are a lot of e-cig and “vape”start-ups in the area, too. Costa Mesa seems to have a lot of new companies. And of course there’s a huge bio-tech community centered around UCI.
There are so many tech start-ups in Westside LA that the area has been dubbed “Silicon Beach.”
I get the impression that SoCal attracts a lot more wealthy foreigners than NorCal does.
* The 2009 list of where the Forbes 400 went to school:
Harvard 54
Stanford 25
Penn 18
Yale 16
Columbia 16
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (11)
Northwestern University (10)
University of Chicago (10)
Cornell University (9)
University of California, Berkeley (9)
University of Southern California (9)
University of Texas, Austin (9).
* The beach bum problem definitely appears to have been an issue from my youth in Santa Cruz. It’s a fun place to grow up–I had a ball–but the achievement level of the natives is not high. Most of them are very happy, so one might wonder whether achievement is all that. However, way back when it was still quite cheap to live there. Now that all the achievers have figured out how easy is to get down 17, they’ve sent housing prices into the upper atmosphere. It’s not quite so easy to be a bum there as it used to be.
* So called white Conservatives did nothing but ruin Los Angeles, they made it unfit to live in. Even before the flood of illegals in the 90′s, the place was going to pot. Developers and their pet council members ate up chunk after chunk of beautiful land and replaced it with junk tract homes, strip malls and assorted architectural monstrosities.
And when they couldn’t find anything left to ruin in Los Angeles proper they went to outlying areas to ruin them as well with more cookie cutter, soul sucking housing tracts that make people hate their lives, more low income apartments, more strip malls and shopping centers. City planning amounted to stuffing as many houses as possible onto a plot of land even if it is on active fault lines.
Locals who wanted to keep their towns as they are were hit with SLAPP lawsuits to shut them up by fat cat developers or they just sued the cities to get what they wanted.
They so over developed the place that made a water shortage all but inevitable.
In my view the real culprits in the CA drought is a your white developer, businessmen and politicians. Who put money before all else.
