Authored by Charles Fitzgerald via GeekWire.com,
Consider a successful mid-sized American city. One with decades of population growth. Median household incomes on par with or exceeding New York City. A bustling port in a prime location. Bold civic architecture. A vibrant arts and cultural scene. And home to some of the world’s biggest and most valuable companies.
That could be Seattle. It also describes Cleveland about 75 years ago.
In the 1950s, Cleveland was an epicenter for the era’s “Big Tech.” Industrial giants like Standard Oil, Republic Steel, and Sherwin Williams were all founded in Cleveland. Likeengineering outpostsin Seattle, other leading companies including General Motors, Westinghouse, and U.S. Steel were well represented locally.
Yet Cleveland’s success unraveled remarkably quickly.
Within 20 years, when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, the city was seared into history as “the mistake on the lake.” The population has declined by 60% since 1950 (and is still shrinking). Cleveland has gone from the seventh largest U.S. city in the country to the 56th. Median household incomes are now less than half the national average — and less than 40% of the Seattle area.
Today in Seattle tech circles there is greattrepidationabout the region’s next act. Seattle is not punching above its weight in the AI era the way we did in the software era. We might not even be punching our weight.
Entrepreneurs, executives, investors, and technologists aredeparting, either because they don’t think they can be competitive here in the white-hot AI market and/or are concerned about a deteriorating business environment. And the exodus appears to be accelerating.
You might take solace that our little corner of the country hosts two of the world’s five biggest companies (which is a little crazy). But it is easy to believe bothAmazonandMicrosoftare past peak employee count, as they become more capital-intensive and lean into AI-driven productivity. Otherlocaltechcompaniesandengineeringcenters are also shrinking, whilenew job listings have plummeted.
While the tech sector confronts existential dread, the political class in Seattle and Washington state seems oblivious. They don’t have much to say about creating jobs or nurturing industries of the future (or even of the present). Revenue is their focus above all else, with considerably less emphasis on how our taxes translate into efficient and effective provision of government services.
Source: ZeroHedge News
