The Abundance of Silicon Valley
It's very worth remembering that the abundance of Silicon Valley is fragile, and temporary.  But I think many articles surmising that the peak is now have the timescale wrong.<p>I'd compare Silicon Valley to Detroit with a century time lag.  The American automotive industry started in the 1890s, just like the Internet industry started in the 1990s.  Like the Internet, it built off a constellation of related technologies that had been under development for 30-40 years.  The automobile industry was built on the iron mines in Duluth, coal mines in Appalachia, petroleum industry in Ohio, steelworks in Pennsylvania, and Great Lakes transportation infrastructure that had been setup throughout the 19th century.  The Internet was built on software from Boston; microcomputers from Albuquerque, Austin, and Houston; an OS from Redmond; semiconductors from Oregon; and so on.<p>In 1910, the population of Detroit was 465,000.  It had nearly doubled from 285,000 in the previous decade, fueled both by international migrants looking for then-high wages and Black migration fleeing persecution in the rest of the U.S. (sound familiar?).  The auto industry was well established, with Model-T production in its heyday.  Supplier networks were already starting to grow up around the big-3 automakers.<p>But Detroit's population didn't peak until 1950, at quadruple its 1910 population.  In between, Detroit would be key to winning two World Wars, and the automobile would fundamentally reshape society.  Most of the growth happened between 1932-1960, and only after key government & societal infrastructure changed to be built around the automobile rather than the automobile serving as a luxury novelty for Gilded Age technorati.<p>Eventually Silicon Valley will end up like Detroit, with abandoned 4-over-1 condo complexes and empty office parks where the software industry once stood.  But we've got a while to go.  We haven't had our war yet, and the basic infrastructure of society - transportation, legal, military, government, etc - is still based on pre-electronic conceptions.