[notacoward]

> How many Nobel Prizes came out of Bell Labs? How many out of Joe Random's Inventoroum Garage?

How many new Nobel prizes came out of smaller (mostly university) labs? A lot more. How many billion-dollar companies have their origins in those other labs, or in Bell's own but only because that centralization was undone by the breakup of its parent? Again quite a lot, some now even bigger than that parent used to be. Not a good argument for centralization.

When we're talking about economics, Nobel prizes are completely the wrong metric anyway. Even basic science benefits from having multiple labs, at universities and other orgs all across the world, sometimes competing with one another and sometimes extending or complementing each other's work. If anything, that's even more true when science turns to engineering turns to business. I might have thought that was obvious here at site hosted by a startup incubator.

You're practically arguing that monopolies are good, which is just crazy on both a practical and a moral level.