IRS tax-return data and the Census Bureau's own county estimates agree on the same real numbers: Los Angeles and Chicago lost more people than San Francisco after 2020, by a wide margin. The city that became shorthand for pandemic flight was the one with the smallest population to lose it from.

By 2005, real language-processing companies existed in Las Vegas, a Boston suburb, Pittsburgh, and a small city outside Salt Lake City -- not one of them in Silicon Valley. Each was funded independently, wherever it already existed, by capital chasing one urgent national need.

The film industry fled to Los Angeles to escape Thomas Edison's East Coast patent monopoly on movie cameras. A decade later, Donald Douglas founded Douglas Aircraft in 1921 by literally renting space in an abandoned movie studio, for nearly identical reasons.