I wonder if the kind of prosperity Silicon Valley has is only possible with specialization. And specialization is a high reward/high risk strategy.

Perhaps other regions with a diversified economic base can never be as spectacularly wealthy, but they should be more insulated from industry collapse.

I'm not sure about that. Boston and NYC both are incredibly prosperous and have well-diversified economies.

I think it's more that diversified, healthy economies take time to grow, and you'll never get the sort of fast growth rates that Detroit or San Jose have had in a diversified economy. Boston and NYC have both been around for close to 400 years; they've had industries rise and fall, which gives them a broad base to fall back upon when the latest industry du jour dies. Boston had a problem much like Detroit in the 1930s-50s when the textile & tanning industries moved south, but it also had grown strengths in education and finance (dating back to the 1600s) that served as the backbone for the tech & biotech revolutions of the 1970s an 1990s.

An interesting comparison might be with Salem, MA, which at the time of the revolution was the 6th largest city in America. Salem's growth was much more concentrated in shipping that neighboring Boston. So when technological development replaced sailing ships with steamships, which needed a deeper harbor than Salem could provide, the city declined until it was a mere suburb of Boston.

I don't buy your arguments. I see no evidence that Boston and New York were any more diversified than cities such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland, or New Haven. Baltimore and Philadelphia had industries rise and fall for centuries. But both are now a wreck. Why? Economic change and transformation is nothing new. Why did so many American cities fall apart at exactly the same time? The diversification argument simply does not pass the smell test.

I think the strength of New York and Boston are due to a couple factors 1) crime never passed a certain tipping point at which most of the productive citizens left and 2) they both are traditional homes of industries that have done well the past thirty years ( finance and education). See my previous comment for the reasons why finance has outperformed manufacturing, - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=657765

I wonder sometimes if Silicon Valley really counts as a hyper-specialized region. True, much of the money in the area comes from businesses that are somehow attached to computer hardware or software, but within that sector, there's an incredible amount of variety in terms of tools, technologies, and client base.

Detroit is failing not just because its economy was driven by the automotive industry -- it was also dependent on a small number of employers (basically the Big Three automakers) who failed to compete with more agile, innovative foreign competitors.

There are certainly bigger players in the SV/Bay area whose disappearance would be felt painfully (Google, Apple, Oracle, etc.), but the business culture in the area also seems fairly able to turn collapses (SGI, AltaVista, Netscape, Sun) into opportunities, or at least mitigate the damage done.

At least San Jose is in a pretty nice area, with a good climate, and access to some nice places (beaches to the SE, San Francisco an hour north, hills to the west and east). That's got to count for something.

Bingo. There are people that would happily move to SJ for all those things but don't because it's expensive. If tech died and that part of SJ/SV's economy dried up, plenty of people would move in with other things.

Detroit is surrounded by some pretty nice places as well. Ann Arbor is a great town. And Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior are really pretty in the summer. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we're not talking about some landlocked post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland.

Having grown up in Michigan and since moved to Silicon Valley, I can say that Detroit and San Jose are not really comparable. The weather in San Jose is much, much nicer. It's sunny and warm most of the year. The four-month winters in Detroit, with their freezing cold and grey skies, are never going to have the same kind of draw.

Ann Arbor is indeed a nice town, and is a reason that people might want to live in Ann Arbor. Living in Detroit so that one might occasionally visit Ann Arbor an hour away makes no sense.

It's true, we're not talking about a landlocked post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland. But it pretty much is an industrial wasteland. An apocalyptic de-industrializing wasteland, if the ever-ongoing decline of the Big Three auto companies can be regarded as a sort of creeping apocalypse.

Err... make that SW, rather than SE, sorry.

Twitter Road for San Jose?

I think this calls for a filk...

Man, this could be worse than Tim Draper performing his version of Smooth alongside Carlos Santana, with the words changed to be about entrepreneurship...