Thread by @Nicolas_Colin

1/ @colindickey I read your article ⤵️. Thank you!

Cc @matthewclifford @Noahpinion

To me, the feeling of agreement with @patrickc & @tylercowen question flows from the introduction of Joe Studwell's "How Asia Works".

medium.com/@colindickey_4…

2/ Back in the 1970s & 1980s many scholars contributed to articulating what came to be known as the "Washington Consensus"—a blueprint of what any country should do to raise the standard of living (that is, progress, as you wrote).

3/ Meanwhile a few countries in Northeast Asia had been doing exactly the opposite of what the Washington Consensus prescribed, notably when it came to capital control—and they went on to raising their standard of living more than any other country before—or after for that matter

4/ Many that aren't practitioners or scholars in development economics had to wait for Studwell's book, which was published in...2014, to find this idea written down as part of a sound, yet accessible narrative: The Washington Consensus was wrong, as proved by 🇯🇵🇹🇼🇰🇷🇨🇳

5/ Likewise for what explains the thriving of Silicon Valley.

Until very recently, the only comprehensive and accessible discussions that I could find about it where from @annosax ("Regional Advantage") and @sgblank ("The Secret History of Silicon Valley"). BUT...

6/ AnnaLee Saxenian's was apparently looked down upon by academia because it was "not quantitative enough".

Meanwhile, Steve Blank is not even an academic. He just did the research that nobody else was bothering doing on what seemed to be a rather critical question.

7/ Now to be fair, there were some scholarly works. I have two examples in mind:

"Fred Terman at Stanford", a thick (and expensive) study by Stewart Gillmor amazon.com/Fred-Terman-St…

& ""Funding a Revolution" by the National Research Council nap.edu/catalog/6323/f…

@billjaneway

8/ It's been part of my job over the past 10 years to write and talk extensively about why SV exists. Apart from Saxenian and Blank, I had to go through dozens of articles and blog entries to try and make sense of the whole story.

Here's @paulg ▶️ paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.…

9/ Meanwhile, nobody in Europe (and I mean, nobody), either in business, policymaking, or academia, had the slightest idea about why Silicon Valley is so successful and why Europe is lagging so far behind.

It's only in the recent period that more enlightening works have appeared

10/ One of them is @billjaneway's "Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy", building up on @CarlotaPrzPerez's "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital".

amazon.com/Doing-Capitali…

amazon.com/Technological-…

11/ Even more recently, two books have just been published that focus on precisely that: Why Silicon Valley?

Finally, scholars got interested.

One is @margaretomara's "The Code": amazon.com/Code-Silicon-V…

The other is Tom Nicholas's "VC": amazon.com/VC-American-Hi…

12/ Might I add that @bfeld and @IanHathaway's "The Startup Community Way" is on its way to being published, combining the insights of a successful venture capitalist and ecosystem builder with the knowledge brought about by a seasoned economist.

amazon.com/Startup-Commun…

13/ But just to mention Nicholas's "VC"—I mean, did you REALLY have to wait until 2019 for an academic to publish a book about the history and economics of venture capital???

(Yes there was Josh Lerner's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", but that's not the same angle.)

14/ What this awful fact says about academia is this:
A) Academia is always late to the party
B) When we're in the middle of a paradigm shift, late to the party is...very late
C) And there might be many problems with incentives and alignment of interests within the academic world

15/ So to sum it up, echoing my thread yesterday ⤵️, there are two options here.

https://twitter.com/Nicolas_Colin/status/1158762855145058304?s=20

16/ Option #1: Maybe we're expecting too much from academia: maybe it's only a tool to be used by the dominant ideology of the time (like the Washington Consensus) and we shouldn't expect it to contribute to inspiring that ideology and building that consensus.

17/ In this case, what's broken is the translation channel—which shouldn't come as a surprise because, again, we're in the middle of a paradigm shift / great transformation / techno-economic transition / you name it.

And so we typically need organic, off-system intellectuals.

18/ Option #2: Maybe academia has the capacity to contribute to inspiring an ideology building a consensus, but in this case, it's high time it takes this mission seriously.

19/ US scholars may consider it part of their job to make their works & ideas accessible for practitioners and the public, and I'm sure it contributes to the sustained superiority of the university system there.

But I can assure you: that's not the case elsewhere in the world.

20/ That's especially not the case viewed from the fast-paced world of tech startups. Those have a lot to teach us because they're at the frontier. They may not have the ability to translate their experience into words, but they KNOW, FEEL, and ACT UPON what's happening.

21/ This is why so many in this world welcomed @patrickc and @tylercowen's article with applauses: Where are the academics when we so badly need them? Who among them is working on what we're witnessing everyday on the ground while we're building startups?

22/ It's also part of an academic's job to make their work known, accessible, and usable. If they don't do it, they'll be overlooked and disparaged by all those that are hungry for results (either entrepreneurs or policymakers)...

23/ ...and someone, like @sciencespo's Emile Boutmy, might very well decide to go around them and rebuild a university system that focuses on today's practice rather than on what has been obvious to practitioners for 10-20 years without any theorist writing a book about it./.