This very very poorly written article is the number one reason why universities assign advisors to PhD students!
If this guy would just talk to one single person who knew something about silicon valley then they wouldn't throw out all these useless theories into a vacuum.
You can just look at America for your answers. If you look at the history of silicon valley in the 1970s it was Chip companies in the 1980s it was PC hardware companies in the 1990s it was networking companies and the 2000s it was internet companies and in the 2010s it is transportation companies. The chip cpu companies have been ejected from silicon valley (vlsi design happens in oregon and austin). The PC hardware companies have been ejected from silicon valley (motherboard design and I/o design in Asia and oregon). Cisco is struggling to hang on but they are being ejected from silicon valley. People are packed into cubicles like sardines there.
The fact is if you have a lot of money silicon valley is the nicest place to live in the richest (overall) country in the world. in these fields you are 100% mobile and the work can be done anywhere so people choose to live with their peers in a place with more recreational and cultural opportunities than anyplace else on earth. And yes they struggle to afford it. Yes there is an underclass with lesser skills who might be well-served by moving to a lower income city or state but they are a fraction - maybe 20% of silicon valley.
People leave silicon valley for Boulder or Seattle most often. more land, less housing pressure, and almost as many recreational opportunities!
if a guy like this wants to know the answer he should talk to my friend who started a 20 million dollar software company in Chicago and then moved to Prague to try to repeat it and he knows exactly why software engineering doesn't scale in Eastern European countries! He is back in the USA running an organic foods company!
another possibility is another friend of mine who went to MIT lives in Taiwan and comes to USA gathers software design projects takes it back home writes this back and has his local programmers implement the system. I am certain he has a world of understanding of why software engineering is not uniformly spread worldwide.
End these other places like Vancouver where I worked as a professor it would have been better for me to get a job as a bus driver I would have been able to buy real estate sooner that way. The economics of deferred gratification just doesn't work in many foreign countries.
There is another answer which is probably the same as why don't other countries have professional football teams like the USA. there are feeder programs that start for talented software engineers as age as young as five years old (I interviewed someone yesterday whose mom began teaching him logo at age 5, after she herself took a class in it).
It's that easy - just freaking talk to someone who knows - don't generate ideas in a vacuum!