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Vietnam's Tech Boom: a Look Inside Southeast Asia's Silicon Valley
rjmarvin writes: Vietnam is in the midst of a tech boom. The country's education system is graduating thousands of well-educated software engineers and IT professionals each year, recruited by international tech companies like Cisco, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, LG, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and others setting up shop in the southern tech hub of Ho Chi Minh City and the central coastal city of Da Nang. Young Vietnamese coders and entrepreneurs are also launching more and more startups, encouraged by government economic policies encouraging small businesses and a growing culture around innovation in the country.
Every day there's another story about some city that's "The Silicon Valley of ________"
Let's just call a spade a spade: The entire world is desperate for an engine of economic growth, and they have all pinned their hopes on tech-fueled riches which in most cases are really just more stories stories of bubble economics,
Tech,mat least in the sense of current gen Internet tech / apps and eCommerce is thoroughly saturated and questionably profitable in a disturbingly large number of cases.
But since most of the world is experiencing economic malaise, collapsing exports and high youth unemployment -- we'll likely hear many more silly stories of "technology capitals" sprouting up in every corner of the world.
One of the economic problems brought about with the rise of trans-global companies is that capital is is fluid while labor is not. I'd be more than happy to live in an area that pays a lower wage as long as the cost of living was commensurately lower, but am disallowed to emigrate to another country. Funny how economist don't regard this as a distortion of the market, but the moment you mention tariffs, they throw their hands up in the air and talk about the evils of government meddling. Makes me want to go back to a gold standard just so they would have to pay for gold barges to pay their new staff. This disproportionality is somewhat addressed through the EU and other trade agreements, but is still looming as a crisis on the horizon: you can only slash and burn so often before you end up with banker's heads on pikes and Marx laughing from his grave.
Nor has economics made any inroads at addressing the problems with abundance. As many products of the tech boom are essentially digital, there is an unlimited supply which can only be profitable with artificial scarcity. Again, most economic theories I've read about are mostly silent about this distortion of the market, even going so far as to create abstractions like IP with a straight face.
It will be the height of irony if current capitalist models pave the way for market communism.