Peter Thiel says California suffers from a “tech curse”. Is he right?
The state is fabulously rich and fabulously dysfunctional
Speaking recently at the National Conservatism Conference in Miami, Peter Thiel, an investor and intellectual, made a provocative argument. He suggested that California suffers from a “tech curse”: a play on the “resource curse”, the notion that countries with abundant natural resources often have weak economies and corrupt political systems. If data is the new oil, then California is the new Saudi Arabia—even, he said, if things aren’t quite “as bad as Equatorial Guinea”.
This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Tech curse”
Finance & economics September 24th 2022
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