How much of a brain drain is there from other industries into tech? And how much does it matter?
I’ve been wondering about how big these technology companies have gotten and we all know just how important they are to the economy. But recently I find it baffling just how big Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta really are. All in the trillions of dollars of market cap.
It’s amazing to me that some these other companies that I would consider extremely important to the economy are so much smaller on a market cap basis. For example at the time of this writing, GM is at $65b, Ford is $52b, all of the airlines are between $5 - $10b, many consumer defensive are significantly smaller like Colgate at $72b, General Mills at $18b, even most finance companies are 1/10th size of the largest mag7 company.
I understand in economics that capital and human capital will then flow to the most economical productive space (ie these tech companies) but has there ever been an analysis done on what we’ve “lost” but not having some of the greatest minds contribute to innovation in cars, airplanes, even physical goods like consumer defensive? I can understand that there isn’t much “juice left to squeeze” from an innovation perspective in these non-tech companies but I can’t help but wonder what we’ve lost by having so many engineers go work at Google and try to make me click more on this ad.