Thread by @PMatzko

Prediction: American dominance of the tech industry has peaked and will decline over the next thirty years.

1) Federal immigration restrictionism is warning off international talent, talent that is instead staying home & building competing tech sectors. theneweconomy.com/technology/top…

2) California is mismanaging Silicon Valley, using it as a cash cow to paper over budgetary holes. Local NIMBY-ism and anti-growth measures worsen the cost of living. All of which will push startups to alternative locations. (The clustering effect is strong, not omnipotent.)

3) Growing public hostility to Big Tech (some of which is self-inflicted) has led to a rise in populist demagoguery. There's a tipping point for how much anti-trust action, GDPR-style regulation, and weakened Section 230 protections can happen before driving investment overseas.

Clustering effects and industrial inertia have kept the US at the forefront of tech innovation for at least a decade despite these growing trends (and in spite of ourselves), but there are disturbing signs that we're reaching the limits of those countervailing forces.

For example, if you want to test a drone delivery service on a large scale, you don't look to the US, which has been waiting for clear regulatory rules from the FAA for years. No, you go to Switzerland. arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/f…

With self-driving cars, initial lawmaker openness has soured in places like Arizona. The VC investor types at TC Disrupt last year all predicted China will have level 5 self-driving cars before the US does. Indeed, VC is flooding away from Silicon Valley at alarming rates.

I'm sure some folks are reading this and thinking, "Good riddance! Big Tech is a curse anyways." But the cautionary tale is to imagine what the last half century of relatively slow economic growth in the US would have looked like without Silicon Valley. ianhathaway.org/blog/2017/5/31…

Lest this sound dire, it's all contingent. There are American cities (like Austin, Grand Rapids, etc) in the global race to be the next Silicon Valley. We can make better decisions going forward that encourage technological innovation and the resulting downstream prosperity.