Japan, with a centrally decided industrial policy, was supposed to eat our lunch. Most experts'' in 1988 predicted ''permanent, decisive inferiority'' for the U.S. chip industry within 10 years, unless government policy fixed the ''fragmented, chronically entrepreneurial'' Silicon Valley, said MIT's Charles Ferguson in the Harvard Business Revew. But fragmentation turned out to be diversity, which makes the valley resilient to downturns and brilliantly adaptable to change, Postrel argues. Technology didn't lead to bigness, order and drab homogeneity, as envisioned in Apple's famous ''Big Brother'' ad. Companies rise and fall and remake themselves, like IBM and Apple.
Nobody's in charge.
It may seem that politics is a battle between technocrats and reactionaries, with the dynamists too busy making money to get into the game. But American culture is fundamentally dynamic, which is why we're so rich. Americans believe in progress, not in happy peasantry. We may be nostalgic for Pleasantville, but we wouldn't want to live there. Reprinted by permission.