Silicon Valley is the center of the universe – a bastion of innovation, capital creation, risk taking, and an unassailable meritocracy where anyone, regardless of national origin, age, or professional status can become instantly rich through hard work and intellect. We’re witnessing a concentration of wealth for the top 1% of IQ, but stagnation for everyone else. This trend will continue. To be smart is a ticket to prosperity in today’s hyper-meritocracy; to be dull is to be condemned to a lifetime mediocrity.
In the great fragmentation, we’re all weirdos and nerds now, or at least many aspire to be, because those are the people who are getting most of the fame and fortune since the 2008 financial problem (we don’t call it a crisis) and the super-effective bailouts that followed, which set the stage for the rapture of the cognitive elite that, for years earlier had been encumbered by excessively high interest rates. People are seeking the truth from intellectuals that present the world from a deterministic viewpoint like Charles Murray and Steven Pinker, shunning the comforting but wholly inaccurate parables-packaged-as-facts of vacuous pop journalists like Malcom Gladwell. Being smart is the most important thing in the world, and with interest rates never going up again, the economy is awash with so much liquidity – making all these smart people very rich for the value they bring to society.
More then ever, the celebration of quick wealth has become the national religion or obsession. You cannot go a week without reading a story about some asset that has exploded in value, or a headline of someone becoming instantly wealthy. This week, there is a lot of chatter about the mysterious 30,000% (not a typo!) surge in CKNY stock, which everyone – especially the left – assumes is a bubble inflated by unscrupulous stock manipulators. But are we jumping to conclusions in being so dismissive of the potential value of this little-known company? Their ‘business model’ is a social network where you pay to connect to celebrities and other important people. The left, being the party of wealth destruction and doom and gloom, wants CYNK’s investors to lose money by spreading rumors it’s a bubble and a fraud when, according to the strongest form of the efficient market hypothesis, bubbles cannot exist. Maybe CYNK is worth $5 billion due to the potential of this social network or maybe it will undergo a reverse merger with a larger company or use the inflated value of its shares to acquire assets. On 7/11/2013, the SEC acquiesced to the left’s cries of fraud and halted trading in CKNY, notching a temporary victory for the left.