Silicon chips use infinitesimal amounts of sand and other readily available materials. They use insignificant amounts of electricity. It's a fortunate truth of human nature that whereas labor can be forced, creativity and innovation cannot be. The exponential progress being created through Moore's Law and the move towards an economy based on knowledge and intellectual property is a permanent revolution. It is a continual paradigm shift, and to understand how to revitalize a company or a country with significant technology assets, one needs to understand how that technology will fit into not just the world of today, but the world one year from now, and two years from now, which will be very different.
History is full of missed paradigm shifts.
But the mayor of Philadelphia had considerably more insight into the importance of this new development. He saw the paradigm shift.