Creating a new Silicon Valley is more difficult than the original Silicon Valley

The original Silicon Valley started in the late 1950s. Since then, many countries tried to reproduce Silicon Valley success, but only Israel could sustain high-tech development over two consecutive innovation waves.

One of the major difficulties in creating a new Silicon Valley would be to talent retention. That is, it is easier than ever for a talented entrepreneur, engineer, or scientist to move to the greater Silicon Valley, which today includes San Francisco. A recent infographic from Bloomberg shows the impact immigrants make on high-tech innovation in the Bay Area (click to enlarge).

In 2010, Asian Americans became the majority of the high-tech workforce in the valley. One third of SV startups are founded by Indian Americans.

tags: silicon valley, innovation, demographics, tool, source

Innovation and fertility rates

(WSJ, Feb 2, 2013) Low-fertility societies don't innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don't invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don't have enough workers to pay for the retirees.

 I don't believe this claim because over the last two hundreds of years fertility rates kept falling while innovation rates kept going up. The process of long-term innovation depends on invention development (e.g. science) and  investment. Once the government guarantees retirement benefits, there are fewer incentives to invest in one's own children. The society as a whole has to learn how to invest in "somebody else's" children and how to attract immigrants willing to invest in their own children.

tags: problem, demographics, trend, innovation

Singapore job satisfaction one of the highest in Asia.

According to Gallup, workers in Singapore have the highest job satisfaction compared to their peers in industrial Asian economies. The Chinese have the lowest.

 

tags: demographics, economy, growth

Daughters are better for the family (long-term.)

Recently, researches* got hold of a treasure trove of mobile phone data, including information about callers' age, gender, and location. By analyzing the frequency of interaction, e.g. via calls and texts, they were able to discern the strength of users' social connections and how they change with age. One of the findings relates to relationships within the family:

... the most dramatic conclusion from this work is about the pattern of social relationships that play the most important role in society. Palchykov and co say the tendency in the past has been to assume that father-son relationships dominate.
By contrast, “our results tend to support the claim that mother-daughter relationships play a particularly seminal role in structuring human social relationships,” they say.

...female reproductive strategies change more explicitly as they age, switching from mate choice to personal reproduction to parental investment and finally grandparental investment, particularly after they reach 40.

Read the whole thing at MIT Tech Review or the original paper at arxiv.org
 
* Vasyl Palchykov, Kimmo Kaski, János Kertész, Albert-László Barabási, and Robin I.M. Dunbar. Sex differences in intimate relationships. 2012.

tags: social, networking, psychology, demographics

2012-2015: lucky years to have babies in the US.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell notes that the generation of Americans born during the Great Depression ( when the birth rate in the US was the lowest on record) did really well economically. They studied at schools and colleges that were less crowded; they got good jobs working for the Baby Boom generation families, and etc. Now, with the Great Recession entering its 5th year, we see a similar birth rate troff:

(Nov 21, 2011. BusinessWeek) - The number of births fell to an estimated 4 million last year, the fewest since 1999, according to National Center for Health Statistics data. American families -- whose finances have been hurt by high unemployment, falling home prices and low pay raises -- lack confidence to plan for “explosions in spending” required by a new child...

By 2015, women in their childbearing years may average 1.75 babies each, a 30-year low, while “ Americans still believe that two or more children is ideal,” said Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. 

Taking into account that "The annual cost of raising a child ranges between $11,880 and $13,830 for a two-parent family earning $57,600 to $99,730," parents who plan to have kids now will presumably get an immediate hit, but their children will gain a long-term advantage over other age cohorts. Further, housing prices for families with kids will soon be the lowest in a generation, which will also add to the advantage. 

A new demographic of smartphone users:

In fact, moms are finding smartphones so useful that they are one of the fastest growing demographics to own smartphones. In the first quarter of 2009, about 14 percent of all wireless users who identified themselves as mothers said they owned a smartphone, according to Neilsen. This figure was up from 8.3 percent of moms who owned a smartphone in the first quarter of 2008.

The No. 1 reason many moms say they have a smartphone is to keep track of their family's schedules. For Russell, with four kids aged 3 years old to 10 years old, the calendar is crucial for alerting her to doctor appointments, horseback riding lessons, football practices, and even reminders for when field trip money is due.

Phone, i.e. voice communication application, is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

July 26, 2009:

BEIJING, (Xinhua) -- Another 10 million users had access to the broadband Internet in China in the first half of the year, adding the total to 93.5 million, data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has shown.

China had 338 million Internet users by the end of June, up 40 million from the end of last year, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in the mid-July.

Population of the United States of America is 307,009,706, which 30 million fewer than the number of Internet users in China.