The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan might have less and less room for poor or middle-income families and no interest in alternative models of development, but innovation economies are fine places to park overaccumulating capital. The city, indeed, could hardly be more hospitable to titans of business. That the billionaire investor Carl Icahn exerts such a heavy influence over Cambridge biotechs Biogen Idec and Genzyme is some kind of strange for sure. Once upon a time, the liberal city could join the nation in reviling Icahn’s brand of speculation as noxious corporate raiding. Now, as innovation whittles away the social basis of activism, Carl Icahn is celebrated as an “activist investor.”

Or consider the fossil fuel billionaire David H. Koch, enemy number one in the minds of progressives across the country for, among other things, funding organizations that deny global warming. Koch sits on the board of public television broadcaster WGBH and underwrites NOVA, its science program—and that’s the least of this entrepreneur’s involvement with the Innovation Economy.