The United States of America is a gigantic country in a way that I think sometimes confuses people. To me, that’s what’s going on when Thomas Friedman suggests that the low level of employment at a handful of high-tech firms is important to understanding macro-scale trends in the American economy:
Read Full Article »Look at the news these days from the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy — Silicon Valley. Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don’t employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they’re all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers.
