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Unlike El Dorado or Camelot, Silicon Valley is a real place. The beating heart of the modern information technology industry is contained in a handful of small towns at the southern end of San Francisco bay, along the El Camino Real. This is where, in the minds of the residents and their global allies, the future is being made.
Blessed by a mild climate and physical beauty, the Valley looks like Shangri-La and creates almost astronomical wealth. Santa Clara County, where much of the Valley lies, had a GDP of over $275 billion in 2017, an astronomical $142,000 per person. Household incomes among the Valley’s elite engineers and executives is much higher, with median incomes in the most exclusive towns exceeding $200,000 a year. The Valley is growing at an amazing rate, nearly 8% per year for the last ten years. Developing country growth rates, super-elite incomes and an amazing physical environment: what’s not to like?
The Valley creates all of this without building much of anything nearby. Industries whose primary value is in what they place on the Internet, such as Google or Facebook, maintain their server farms elsewhere. Companies that still build things, like HP or Cisco, also do that somewhere else. To their eyes, therefore, their wealth is environmentally clean and what’s more, it’s produced in a largely egalitarian social setting.
Global trade is also a daily feature of life in the Valley’s heartland. Many employees are migrants from China and India. Sales are worldwide, production is managed from plants throughout the world. For Valley residents, immigration, trade, and globalisation are unmitigatedly good things.
These views are most strongly held among Silicon Valley business leaders. A survey last year found them supportive of free trade and more open immigration, which perhaps explains why around 99% of Silicon Valley’s political contributions went to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The lived experience of ‘flyover country’ residents, though, couldn’t be more different. For many, globalisation can kill your firm, your job, and your community. While immigrants in the elite areas of the Valley are mainly college-educated and fluent in English, immigrants in flyover country are not necessarily either.
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