Author: Curt Doolittle

GOSSIP

Back in Seattle for a few days. Hearing the usual industry gossip. (This is still such a small town.) And, I suppose nothing should surprise me. But the daftness of human beings, and their ability to envision drama where none exists, never ceases to amaze me. How on earth do people come up with this stuff?

Nothing ever happens to or with money without a lot of bankers and investors agreeing to it. The world is a mundane, bureaucratic, procedural place administrated by lawyers who are incentivized to over analyze everything.

Each of us has a narrow view of the world, and an exaggerated concept of our place in it.

This region is extremely simple. We had one company that created a lot of manufacturing and engineering jobs, that was overtaxed, over-regulated, and finally fled the state. We then won the lottery and got a second company that concentrated an unheard of amount of money in what was a previously semi-rural population. That company had an atypical organizational structure that asked purchasing decisions to me made by very junior people. That purchasing strategy was important when technology was new – since the older generation would not have been as aggressive or experimental – or cheap to hire.

But times change. People learn. Competitors emerge. And the Innovator’s Dilemma (curse) and the rent-seeking and laziness, politicization and disutility of bureaucracy take their normal course. That company no longer spends money in the same manner. It’s stock no longer appreciates in value as it did. And it’s employees no longer posses the relative wealth that they did. And so the entire region is affected by those changes.

And many people, who previously sold their skills and labor to that company, and because of it, who had an impression of themselves and their skills as special, scarce or unique, are now stunned and despondent over the change in their fortunes. They lived in homes, worked at companies, and built organizations, during a period, where the entire American economy was booming with debt, booming with cheap overseas products, and while at the same time, that regional company was exporting cash into a town with scarce resources, and a small population. Those frustrated people are competing the broader economy, not the unique and temporary economy that they were living in during the past. Like American laborers, who must now compete in the global economy against people who will work 14 hours a day doing the same work, people in this area must compete globally.

Revel in our time. In what we had. But don’t expect that it is repeatable. Or that there is anything you, or the people you work for, or the politicians that supposedly administer our governments, could have done anything about. If you had the opportunity to live during the period from 1988 – 2008 in this area, then appreciate having had the joy of participating in one of the greatest times and places to live in human history. (Remember the fun of Entros? The art galleries prior to 2001? The multiple playhouses? The increase in great restaurants? The feeling that it would never end? Daily life when Neo came upon our movie screens? Remember when Redmond was the ‘sticks’, and when Bellevue didn’t have a skyscraper?)

The American dream was first built on cheap land. Second on jobs that were possible because of cheap land. Third because the world went into a debilitating war. Fourth because of cheap credit made possible by the petrodollar and our postwar anti-communist military capability.

But the world caught up. There was no malfeasance – on anyone’s part. It’s just the slow five hundred year grid, as industrial capitalism moved from the heartland of England to every nation in the world. People in Beijing and countless other cities are living the seattle experience today. We can envy them, or celebrate them.

It’s a choice.