This line of reasoning can be brought to bear upon other questions. One I've been thinking about (brought up by PG, too): why is it that startups form disproportionately in Silicon Valley? I started to derive a result showing that SV could be in a different thermodynamic 'phase' than the rest of he world, but my thoughts ran away with me -- it will have to wait on a couple revisions.
PS: It goes from interesting and reasonable to joke territory, pretty quickly.