What can Silicon Valley learn from Camden and its empty acres? What can we learn?
From a business standpoint, the lesson seems to be that nothing lasts forever. From a worker’s standpoint, it might be that nobody’s skills are as irreplaceable as he or she might hope. From an investor’s standpoint, the takeaway lesson is to think twice about pouring money into a company so established that its failure is unimaginable.
When I moved to Camden, New Jersey, I expected to find a city struggling with poverty, unemployment, and crime. I didn’t expect to find a post-industrial landscape littered with technological relics that only an engineer like me could love.1
Imagine an entire sector of our economy—like the tech sector, with all those jobs in Silicon Valley and beyond—evaporating over the course of one worker’s lifetime. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced it was cutting 14 percent of its workforce. Those 18,000 lost jobs constitute the largest layoff in the company’s history. As I look at those figures, I think of Camden as it once was, and wonder if the future always looks like this: gritty and deserted. Maybe yesterday never sees itself being crowded out until it’s too late. “Eventually,” Bill Gates famously said, “all companies are replaced.”
If Camden’s middle class could lose all those jobs, there is no magic holding Silicon Valley’s jobs in place. While it is true that industrial jobs are not technical jobs and stevedores are not coders, the market forces are the same. When a game-changing product hits the market, companies tool up to meet demand and they hire people. When the public’s appetite is sated and profits sag, those jobs evaporate or they go someplace where people will work for less. And since this is true, there is nothing to prevent any town from declining the way Camden did. The desk jobs could drain out of our office buildings. The buildings would stand empty for awhile, then they themselves would be gone. Here's something else Bill Gates is widely quoted as having said: “We always overestimate the changes that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the changes that will occur in the next ten.”
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My apartment is in a converted factory that fills a city block, and its wall of 14-foot-tall windows was designed to create a well-lit space for industrial workers. From those windows, I can see the river where barges once brought in raw materials for manufacturers that have been gone a long time. A short walk away is a century-old warehouse hand-crafted of brick. Even closer to home are the remnants of the coal yard that powered acres of manufacturing plants. It’s all here if you know where to look. So is the poverty and crime I’d heard so much about.
The trouble with tooling up to meet a sudden worldwide demand is that demand is eventually sated.
Peering out those fabulous windows at a notoriously dangerous place, I wondered: “What happened?” and “Why?” Tens of thousands of people once worked in this building where I sit, all of them earning good wages by making things that nobody buys any more. The view from my living room takes in acres of parking lots, and their pavement covers the foundations of still more dead factories. On the far side of the building? More of the same. Within eyeshot of this spot, there were once enough industrial jobs to keep an entire city employed. Now? I dare say there aren’t any.
I doubt that the people working here in the early 20th century could have imagined how quickly the hulking buildings, the towering smokestacks, the massive coal yard, and the far-flung rail spurs could simply disappear. No ruins. Not even any stray bricks. Razed. Demolished. Gone.