DAN BREZNITZ RECOGNIZES that place matters—that we need a plurality of approaches to economic development suited to different communities across our nation. Not everyone can or should live in Silicon Valley, Boston, or Seattle, and not every community should aspire to emulate them. Breznitz charts a reasonable middle ground between a romanticized call to bring the old jobs back and a new age “techno-fetishism” exhorting everyone to learn to code. The former is not good enough for communities that have been left out of the modern wealth-generation engine. The latter leads to absurd pronouncements such as Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s recent remark that hospitality and tourist sectors would not face a worker shortage if workers acquired “digital skills” and learned about cloud computing and cybersecurity.
Breznitz believes deeply in innovation but argues that there are multiple paths open to communities as they reinvent themselves. I agree entirely. Not every community needs to court the next Amazon headquarters or to fund the next Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter. A community need not chase unicorns and should draw instead on existing assets. They should feel free to ignore the Silicon Valley mantra of going from “zero to one”—meaning inventing new products with breakthrough technology. Broadening the opportunity horizon, Breznitz celebrates “1 to n”—the kind of incremental progress that Valley entrepreneurs may dismiss as lacking sufficient ambition. For Breznitz, communities can take pride in providing specialized IT services, or in becoming essential suppliers as part of a critical global supply chain, or in improving the production process of consumer or industrial goods. Innovations come in all shapes and sizes.