New England’s economic decline is linked to Silicon Valley’s rise,all because of the outcome of an argument 50 years ago. More:
The present-day fate of New England goes back to an argument at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the ’50s about that material from which semiconductors, well understood locally from wartime work on radar, were to be manufactured in the years ahead. Dogma held that it would be germanium; silicon crystals would be too difficult to purify to the required degree. Robert Noyce, an MIT-trained physicist, thought otherwise.
When MIT declined to tenure him, Noyce decamped, first to Philadelphia, then to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, in Mountain View, California. Silicon leadership went with him – to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, each of which he co-founded, And eventually to Silicon Valley, centered around San Jose, which the two firms spawned. New England never developed a vigorous industry in silicon chips. By the end of the ’70s, savvy venture capitalists had begun migrating to Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road.
(H/T: The Browser)
MH - secular misanthropist 
JustMe 
Bruce Ross 
I wouldn’t call it decline at all, and neither does the article. What has happened is adaptation to changing circumstances.
Medicine, biotech and pharmaceuticals are enormous in Massachusetts now, and lots of companies (Google included) are setting up laboratories in Cambridge. I don’t even recognize the Kendall Square area near MIT, there is so much construction going on. And the Route 128 corridor continues to be the home of more and more firms. The Commonwealth and the nation of Chile recently signed a bilateral science and education agreement. The state’s unemployment rate is down to 7.0%, and the Boston metro area is even lower.