In an ideal world, all the smart people – the scientists and engineers, the physicists and mathematicians, the coders and quants – would get all the good jobs and make all or most of the money. The good news is we’re in that world right now, especially since 2008 with the unending web 2.0, real estate & stock market boom and STEM being the new celebrity status in America today. Of course, there will always be some unemployment among STEM graduates, but their career prospects are far better than a typical liberal arts major.
Silicon Valley Is a Big Fat Lie
Sounds like more cry me a river from the left. The left is so desperate for another 2008-like crisis so that rich people lose money, that the liberal media – similar to the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax – has to make stuff up in order to bolster their arguments and advance their anti-capitalism narrative, throwing all journalistic integrity out the window. When the crisis doesn’t come, the left’s only recourse is to push the date of supposed crisis further to the right, as well as fanning/fomenting crisis by turning molehills into mountains in the hope that one of these non-issues will somehow snowball into a full-fledged crisis just by news coverage alone. The left hopes that repeatedly calling Silicon Valley and the stock market a bubble will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but as shown below by the long string of failed predictions since 2009 of a stock market crash, wishful thinking seldom – if ever- yields the desired results. No amount of whining about ‘bubble’ will make Uber and Snapchat become pets.com and Webvan, sorry libs, nor will it make Facebook become Myspace. To the left, the perfect world is one where we’re all irrational savages coddled by a paternal state where no one is intrinsically better than anyone else.
This is EXACTLY why you always do your own research.
Here's every top call since 2009 -> http://t.co/QaRZspLU5r $SPY pic.twitter.com/ZLTNQAYUbl
— StockTwits (@StockTwits) May 31, 2015
The brightest minds in tech just lately seem more concerned with silly business ideas and innocuous “disruption,” all for the shot at an immense payday. And when our country’s smartest people are working on the dumbest things, we all lose out.
The author is waging a thinly-veiled war against IQ and wealth creation, pretending to be ‘looking out’ for the ‘best interests’ of the ‘common man’, provided that rich, smart people are to blame and the solution is wealth redistribution and class warfare. This is much in the same way as those who want the fed to raise rates pretend to be looking out for ‘main street’, despite the fact that raising rates too soon would actually destroy wealth by possibly triggering a recession and a bear market. Peter Schiff comes to mind as someone who advocates wealth-destroying policy under the guise of helping people and the economy.
These ‘silly’ ideas occasionally give rise to entire industries, such as social networking and mobile advertising, much in the same way as the invention of the transistor made small computers possible. In contrast to the nostalgia for ‘macro-inventions’ like jet-packs, flying cars, and moon colonies, the future is in miniaturization, financialization, and ‘micro-technologies’ such as apps, payment processing, and biotechnology.
Another reason is that macro-technologies are often too capital intensive, a problem compounded by the high failure rate for start-ups. Founders and VCs know they can get a much higher ROI on an app or a website than a physical business. Furthermore, these apps are being valued as richly, if not more, than physical businesses. When you have an app like Snapchat, which cost nothing to launch, being worth 1/4 the market cap of Ford Motors, it doesn’t take a genius to see where venture capital is going to flow. Despite high-profile web 1.0 failures, such as pets.com and Webvan, internet and app companies are among the most profitable industries in existence, with Facebook and Google, for example, posting operating profit margins above 30% – among the highest of the S&P 500. Linkedin and AOL are also extremely profitable. It’s doesn’t cost much money to serve ads to billions of users, and it costs next to nothing to store users’ photos and profile information on a server.