Listen, Liberal (Thomas Frank) pp188-91
188 THOMAS FRANK
“co-working” spaces like “Workbar” and “WeWork,” shared offices for startups that can’t afford the real thing. There are startup “incubators” and startup “accelerators,” which aim to ease the innovator’s eternal struggle with an uncaring public: the Startup Institute, for example, and the famous Mass-Challenge, the “World’s Largest Startup Accelerator,” which runs an annual competition for new companies and hands out prizes at the end.
The keystone of the inno-structure is the university; indeed, some people in this city of universities have come to believe that the starting-up of companies and the launching of professional careers is the very purpose of higher education. The one equals the other. It is the reason MIT has two associate deans for innovation rather than just one and that its president writes op-eds instructing the nation about the right way “to deliver innovation.” It is the reason Northeastern University has a “venture accelerator” it calls IDEA; that Harvard has the famous Innovation Center; that Boston University’s business school has a Department of Strategy and Innovation; that its College of Engineering has a Product Innovation Center; and that one of its colleges offers a certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
At Harvard, where I met innovation guru Clayton Christensen ambling across a parking lot, the dream of being the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates is almost palpable. As well as the usual incubators and accelerators, the school boasts a $100 million venture capital fund that is focused on commercializing the ideas of former students. One of this fund’s press releases quotes a Harvard professor on how this heap of money advances the school’s “mission,” which today (apparently) includes “marshaling significant resources to help create thrilling companies.” The fund holds campus events too, and at the one I attended, at a Harvard dormitory called Eliot House, an audience of undergraduates listened as a professor from a nearby university talked about his many patents in the medical and pharmaceutical fields.
Sometimes the theology of the innovation cult is stated plainly: We know what makes an economy work, and it is university-driven innovation. The state’s own Department of Housing and Economic Development says it flatly on its web-site: “The foundation of the Massachusetts economy is the innovative and entrepreneurial capability of its residents to transform existing technologies and industries and create new ones.” This is the state government speaking, remember. It continues:
The pillars of this innovation economy are the state’s universities and research institutions, the rich cluster of innovation-based companies, and the sophisticated angel, venture capital and financial services communities that help fund and mentor the pipeline of entrepreneurs. At the heart are the skilled and creative people who choose to make Massachusetts their home.
More typical, however, are tail-chasing proclamations like this one, which can be found on the website of the MIT Innovation Initiative: “The MIT Innovation Initiative is an Institute-wide, multi-year agenda to transform the Institute’s innovation ecosystem – internally, around the globe and with its partners – for accelerated impact well into the 21st century.”
This sounds distinctly like bullshit, but if MIT wants to think of itself in such a way, that’s their business. The problem arises when we enshrine innovation as a public philosophy – when we look to it as the solution to our economic ills and understand it as the guide for how economies ought to parcel out rewards. To put it bluntly, it is not clear that cheering for innovation in the bombastic way we see in the blue states actually improves the economic well-being of average citizens. For example, the last fifteen years have been a golden age of financial and software innovation, but they have been feeble in terms of GDP growth. In ideological terms, however, innovation definitely works: as a way of excusing soaring inequality and explaining the exalted status of the rich, it is the best we’ve got.
TRIUMPH OF THE INNO-CRATS
Massachusetts’s identification with the Democratic Party is profound and well-known. The home state of the Kennedy family, it has produced two other Democratic presidential nominees in recent decades – Governor Michael Dukakis and Senator John Kerry – and was, as we know, the only state won by George McGovern in 1972. Mitt Romney, the Republican leader in 2012, also hailed from the Bay State, but Massachusetts was none too enthusiastic about his candidacy. When that year’s results were in, Romney didn’t carry a single county of the state he had once served as governor.
Even when Massachusetts has had Republican governors, it hasn’t really mattered. Not only do these lonesome GOPers tend to be just as dedicated as their rivals to the blue-state model, but the Mass legislature remains lopsidedly Democratic no matter what, capable of passing whatever it chooses over the governor’s veto. In the time I was writing this book, for example, the state’s senate included only six Republican members out of forty – a lopsided normal that is, among other things, an almost perfect mirror image of the Kansas state senate.
Politically speaking, the cult of the knowledge economy goes back a long way in Massachusetts. Many, if not all, of the state’s leading politicians have done their part boosting for it over the years, celebrating startups and professing their admiration for the creative class.
Among this honor roll of innovation Democrats, former Governor Deval Patrick, who presided over the Massachusetts government from 2007 to 2015, takes pride of place. He is typical of liberal-class leaders; you might even say he is their most successful exemplar. Everyone seems to like him, even his opponents. He is a witty and affable public speaker as well as a man of competence, a highly educated technocrat who is comfortable in corporate surroundings. Thanks to his upbring-ing in a Chicago housing project, he also understands the plight of the poor, and (perhaps best of all) he is an honest politician in a state accustomed to wide-open corruption. Patrick was also the first black governor of Massachusetts and, in some ways, an ideal Democrat for the era of Barack Obama – who, as it happens, is one of his closest political allies.
“Our government is incredibly enlightened,” said John Harthorne, the head of the MassChallenge startup incubator, in a 2010 TED talk in which he explained why he chose Massachusetts for his planned entrepreneurial utopia. “I would wager a bet that Deval Patrick could go head-to-head on an intelligence test with any other governor.”
Patrick’s oft-told life story follows the classic Democratic trajectory. A young man with loads of intelligence but no money, Patrick was lifted from nowheresville by an academic scholarship to a fancy prep school. A few years after that, he got into Harvard and, in exactly the manner of the Clinton and Obama stories, the doors to a previously unknown world swung open for him.
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