Our New Economic Era

Welcome to the Tuesday, a weekly newsletter about business ventures, linguistic adventures, political misadventures, venturing into new subjects as events dictate. The Tuesday is available only to NRPlus members — please do sign up if you haven't already.

Where to Invest?

Silicon Valley isn't just rich — it feels rich, too: Central San Francisco may have a late-capitalist fin de siècle pre–Walking Dead feel to it, but the genteel precincts of West Atherton and Menlo Park feel like a different, happy, refined little world. Because Silicon Valley has a kind of self-enforced sumptuary law, only certain kinds of conspicuous consumption are socially acceptable — you'll see more Lamborghinis parked outside an Eddie V's in Houston than you'll see ferrying the suburban aristocracy of Very High Tech America to and from wherever it is they go. As the Guardian reported in 2019, Silicon Valley is on a GDP per capita basis wealthier than such global enclaves of the serious money as Luxembourg, Macau, and Qatar, at least as the World Bank ran the numbers in the pre-Covid economy.

With $128,647 in economic output per person in 2017, Silicon Valley represented the crème de la crème of big money, almost within economic spitting distance of . . . Midland, Texas, which reported a GDP/capita that was substantially higher at $174,749.

Midland doesn't feel rich. A lot of it feels temporary — and weird, and brutal, and Blade Runner–ish where it is not positively Martian in its barrenness and austerity.

But the road from Midland to Menlo Park isn't as long as you might think.

Things are a little weird in the economy right now. The U.S. economy is currently suffering from a combination of weak (and, recently, negative) economic growth at the same time it is dealing with high inflation — a "stagflation" Americans have not endured since the 1970s. (You know, the 1970s: the age of disco and butterfly ... READ MORE

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