Google “the next Silicon Valley” and you’ll find stories about Chicago, Boise, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, even cities in Europe and India. For decades now, everyone has been trying to replicate the Bay Area’s booming, venture capital-backed technology industry.
But new research out of the Yale School of Management traces many of the region’s most glaring problems — soaring income inequality, high cost of living and shrinking middle class — can be traced to the venture capital that helped build Silicon Valley.
“Most of what we’re showing in this paper is that the returns, who is benefiting from that, are very unevenly distributed,” said Olav Sorenson, the professor that co-authored the new research.
Image: Facebook employees take a ping pong break on May 8, 2014, at the company’s campus in Menlo Park, Calif. The social networking company might want to order more ping pong tables — it is planning to add thousands more workers by 2019. - https://www.mercurynews.com/
