Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines
I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s more like conventional factory towns from a couple centuries ago.<p>I grew up in the Boston area, and on a recent trip back home, took my wife to see Lowell National Historic Park, birthplace of the industrial revolution in America.  It struck me how similar the stories of the young women who went to work in the mills were to the young people who now flock to the Bay Area.  Like today&#x27;s workers, they were fleeing political instability &amp; violence (for immigrants) or economic stagnation and lack of opportunity (for domestic migrants).  Like in the Bay, they were thrust into a melting pot of cultures that sometimes stirred conflict but usually ended up broadening their horizons.  Like in SF, they lived in small tenements or boardinghouses, often 2&#x2F;room.  Like at tech startups, they worked long hours in often alienating conditions to make capital owners rich.<p>The interesting thing about it was that despite all the hardship, it was very often the right choice financially for them.  Many of the women who worked in the mills would &quot;retire&quot; in their mid-late 20s or early 30s, having saved up the majority of their wages.  They were then free to do things like become a pastor (the 1840s equivalent of living a life of spiritual enlightenment), or get an education (nearly unheard of for women in those days), or marry above their previous station and have a family, or return to their hometowns and buy up large swaths of farmland that would&#x27;ve been out of their reach had they stayed on the farm they grew up on.<p>The people who really got screwed by the industrial revolution were those who <i>didn&#x27;t</i> take the factory jobs in poor conditions - the small homesteading farmers, the artisans and craftspeople, the local merchants.  They were largely wiped out as the new means of production spread throughout the world, bankrupt dinosaurs who eventually had to sell what was left of their homesteads when the dust bowl hit almost a century later.  Most of them ended up catching the <i>next</i> wave, though, migrating to California or the Great Lakes and getting jobs in the new aerospace, defense, and automotive industries.