Globalization’s Winner-Take-All Economy
13th January 2017
“If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”
This statement by Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and venture capitalist, unsurprisingly caused a stir, given that he made it in Chicago. Simon Kuper had made a similar observation in the Financial Times when he described how young Dutch up-and-comers had their sights set on London, not Amsterdam. “Many ambitious Dutch people no longer want to join the Dutch elite,” Kuper wrote. “They want to join the global elite.”
This same attitude is leading to the drain of young people out of the small towns of the heartland into the big cities, often those on the coast. Anyone with an ounce of talent or ambition heads for the city.