Silicon Valley is No Model for America
7th March 2014
Joel Kotkin blows the whistle.
Rather than a beacon for upward mobility, the Valley increasingly represents a high-tech version of a feudal society, where the vast majority of the economic gains go to a very select few. The mostly white and Asian tech types in Palo Alto or San Francisco may celebrate their IPO windfalls, but wages for the region’s African American and large Latino populations, roughly on third of the total, have actually dropped, notes a recent Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, down 18 percent for blacks and 5 percent for Latinos, from 2009-11.
Meanwhile, the poverty rate in Santa Clara County since 2001 has soared from 8 percent to 14 percent; today one of four people in the San Jose area is underemployed, up from a mere 5 percent just a decade ago. The food-stamp population in Santa Clara County, meanwhile, has mushroomed from 25,000 a decade ago to almost 125,000 last year. San Jose, the Santa Clara County seat, is also home to North America’s largest homeless encampment, known as “the Jungle.”
What the Valley increasingly offers America is an economic model dominated by the ultrarich, and generally well-educated, with few opportunities for working-class people, women and minorities. As Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, recently acknowledged, “Silicon Valley is two valleys. There is a valley of haves, and a valley of have-nots.”
And, not surprisingly, the place is overwhelmingly ‘progressive’.