Startups are fragile things by their very nature -- few succeed even under the best of circumstances. What makes Silicon Valley and a very few other places different, he noted, was that their culture contained an antidote to Startupicide -- such places embrace an ethos that encourages rather than crushes startups and the broader mentality from which they grow. "The problem is not that most towns kill startups. It's that death is the default for startups, and most towns don't save them," Graham notes. "Instead of thinking of most places as being sprayed with startupicide, it's more accurate to think of startups as all being poisoned, and a few places being sprayed with the antidote."

Jane Jacobs identified almost exactly the same dynamic when I asked her some years ago why only a handful of places pioneer innovations and unleash the creativity of their residents, while most are content to sputter along, stagnate, and even die. "Each and every community," she told me, "is filled with lots and lots of creative and innovative people." The trouble is with a small core of people she dubbed "Squelchers," who are instinctively opposed to doing anything new or different. Unfortunately, these people are often a town's business and political leaders. You've probably seen them in action; maybe you've even bumped up against them yourself.

Only a handful of places are endowed not only with a great research university, but a culture that tolerates and actively encourages risk-taking. Most places prefer to play it safe. But doing more of the same is hardly an option when your prospects are as bleak as they are for so many cities these days. The economic crisis has brought us to a great tipping point, what I have elsewhere termed a Great Reset -- an epoch when creative destruction spreads from technologies and industries to society, culture, and geography at large; when new business models, new institutional systems, and new geographic clusters of innovation and risk-taking come to the fore. A Great Reset is one of those rare occasions when "Squelchers" and their old squelching ways are transcended, when more and more people and places can get access to the antidote to startupicide.

And any halfway-sentient person can tell that this is precisely what is happening today. The old order is dying, and despite governments' best efforts to blow life back into it, it cannot be resuscitated. More and more people, and more and more places, realize that the key to the future no longer lies in waiting for a big company to take you under its wing, in flipping stocks (like Wall Street does), or flipping houses. The limits of a trading economy are there for all to see, manifest in the wreckage of the recent crisis.

Now is a time to build. And the urge and the mechanisms to build are what drives the Start-Up Nation. Not just tech startups a la Silicon Valley, but the start-up ethos writ large -- the builder's ethos, the ethos of creating something altogether new. It is an ethos shared by musicians forming bands, filmmakers financing their movies with credit cards, social innovators and entrepreneurs pursuing new approaches to solving global as well as local problems. It is the ethos of the Creative Class.