Quote:
Originally Posted by Zedd Spectrum
Its a hypothetical based in truth. If you wanna see how powerful a city is, how can it hurt others?
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That hypothetical only exists in your head man. If you want to go that bizarre route, I could say Boston's financial services companies could intentionally tank all pensions/401(k)s associated with Houston...or I guess I could say all the scientists in Boston could turn evil and create a virus that kills everyone in Houston? I don't know. Probably a weird way to look at this sort of thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zedd Spectrum
Then why isn't this reflected in the GDP?
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As I mentioned before, not all economic power can be gauged within GDP.
Life sciences research isn't reflected in GDP because that individual sector doesn't necessary
produce money. Instead, it receives it via public and private investment.
Regarding venture capital (private) investment (which is not just life sciences, this includes tech investments), in 2010 Boston received roughly $2.47 billion. Comparatively, the entire state of Texas only received $981 million. As of 2012, Boston's number had risen to over $3.1 billion. This is #2 for American VC investments behind the gargantuan level received by the SF Bay, and it's nearly 40% more than received by the #3 city, New York.
For public investments (NIH Funding), Boston/Cambridge receive more than any other city in the country, by far. In 2013, Boston/Cambridge received roughly $2.4 billion in NIH grants vs #2 NYC, which received $1.4 billion. In fact Boston/Cambridge outgained every
state in the country except for California, which received $3.3 billion in 2013. Comparatively, the entire state of Texas received $1 billion in 2013.
Please note that this level of funding doesn't include the massive amounts of internal investment made by private pharma/biotech companies, which aren't included in either of these figures. This includes investments by Genzyme/Sanofi, Novartis, biogen idec, Millennium/Takeda, Vertex, Merck Serono, Shire, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Cubist, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, or Abbott...just to name a few.
Before you get all giggly and laugh about the fact that these figures are in the single-digit billions, you need to put these numbers in context of the industry. These are the highest and second highest levels of funds received in the country and potentially the world.
If raw dollar levels are more your thing, then let's talk financial services. Unfortunately, Texas isn't really much of a player when it comes to this area, so I don't really have any legit levels to give you an estimate of Houston's asset management levels. However, I can say that it is below Charlotte, who ranked relatively far down the list with $655 billion AUM (assets under management). Boston comes in at #2, behind NYC, with a dizzying $5.563
trillion under management. You could combine #3 & #4 (LA & SF) and still have $1 trillion left to spare before they could match Boston's level.
Not to mention the roughly $20 trillion held under custody by State Street alone.
So as you can see, there's much more to economic power than solely raw GDP numbers.
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