[com2kid]

> People seriously feared Japan was going to eclipse the American economy.

California is the only thing that keeps America competitive.

Without doing any research to back it up, I'll gladly claim that Silicon Valley (along with Microsoft[1] throughout the 90s/early 2000s) has driven the majority of the world's GDP growth in the last 30 years. The VC funding model for companies, the willingness to take risks, and the insane (over)work ethic, is why technology has exploded and impacted every aspect of life.

[1] Love it or hate it, a single unified target for business and consumer computer applications was a huge boon to the world. Just look at all the massive efficiency losses having to support 2 smartphone platforms, and that is with each having addressable markets in the billions. Now imagine if there had been 5 different PC platforms in the 90s to write for, with only hundreds of thousands of users on each one worldwide.