I am not defending inequality but how is stock-based wealth taking away from lower income workers? Is it a taxation issue?
Does the number of billionaires impact the overall cost of living of a whole metro area? If so, how?
I don’t quite understand the comparison. Genuinely asking.
https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/docs/SVPI%202025%20Annual%20Report%...
>0 Number of student wellness centers in the San José Unified School District that opened in 2024, despite the growing mental health crisis in youth
>0 Number of Narcan kits stocked at San José Unified School District schools, making SJUSD the only major Bay Area school district that does not stock Narcan or train staff to administer Narcan in case of a fentanyl overdose.
What's the implication supposed to be? That if it weren't for AI tech bros, there would be student wellness centers and narcan kits?
However, it seems like a lot of what they worry about is the victimhood from being envious.
Things that are currently underfunded could, with the availability of more funds, be less underfunded.
Obviously it's not just the nine billionaires that are "the problem", but inequality in general.
Is it really a funding issue? The same quote mentions that other bay area school districts were somehow able to afford narcan kits.
A high gini coefficient isn’t because of someone accumulating more wealth than everyone else, its because of low velocity of money movements in the economy
Fixing the speed of money movements solves the other problems and results in more people having wealth, or access to services. Note that its not completely arbitrary money movements, its into goods and services and investments. This has to be more attractive than passively holding money and assets, which is what most risk-averse people’s entire plan is.
For full disclosure, when I was working in Silicon Valley as a tech writer a few years ago, I was making over $200K in salary and bonuses, no stock options. Now I'm working remotely in Florida, contracting with a "managed services" company who's placed me with a much bigger tech company (one you've definitely heard of) which uses this structure to keep salaries down, and I'm making $35/hr -- and the company only pays for benefits in the most technical sense, e.g., I can buy health insurance with pre-tax money but they don't contribute any of it, there's a 401(k) but it effectively has no corporate matching, I get 10 days of PTO a year, etc.).
Piecemeal sales aren't affected by the total amount though? If I'm a billionaire vs a 100 Billionaire, I'm still taking out the same amounts to live and buy yachts.
Also, as far as I can tell, it's not these 9 Billionaires hoovering up housing in the valley either. They all utmost have 2-3 properties, most of the rest of the market remains unaffected by this inequality.
In this local context, Citizens United is irrelevant too, most of the state MP's and local council members are not funded by the Billionaires and do not need to kowtow to their policy preferences.
So how exactly is inequality driving the cost of living?
EDIT: I do wish someone would actually answer this question. Everytime I bring this up I get yelling (or downvotes) in response. I agree Citizens United has really changed how Billionaires are able to affect federal elections, but in these local cases like "Silicon Valley", how does inequality affect the cost of living? This is a sincere question.
High rent means high wages, which means high costs for business, which means high prices for consumers...
States like Texas keep housing low, which means lower wages for workers and lower prices for consumers, but I don't want us to artificially impoverish people in order to achieve the goal of "affordability."
Instead we have to lower rent without lowering income as much. This would cause an explosion in average spending power and therefore a much stronger middle class.
Great right? Yes it would be, except for the landlords, real estate investors, and middle aged homeowners who will do anything and hurt almost anyone to keep the value of their properties artificially inflated to preposterous levels. Unfortunately, those are the people in charge in most cities.
Rich people have much more money than they need to live and therefore must spend their money on assets and other such things to avoid depreciation. They don’t just buy a massive house to live in, they buy properties, which drives up house prices and rent. They also finance mortgages, which enable poorer people to afford more expensive properties by putting themselves in more debt to the rich.
Extreme wealth of a few therefore has a direct impact on the price of essentials for those with less money.
QE isn’t directly responsible for house prices increasing, but the pandemic measures effectively transferred a vast amount of wealth to companies, shareholders and banks, rapidly making inequality worse.
He claims that the most equal time in British history - with the most affordable housing - was post-war 20thC, pre ‘80s neoliberalism and prices of assets have been creeping up since.
Workers could have some/more of that stock. Nearly all workers own precisely zero share of the companies they work for, despite what this tech-oriented crowd might imagine. So when a company does well and the ownership's wealth surges, the worker bees only benefit down the line if they're able to successfully lobby for a raise. Though that doesn't always work, since the factors that drive up stock values often involve things like laying off expensive workers, cutting benefits and freezing pay. Huzzah.
So it's not exactly "taking away" anything, it's more that the entire system is stacked to ensure the workers don't have anything to take away to begin with.
No. This isn’t the result of The Market happening more to nine households than everybody else. That isn’t a thing that happens
The result is that their imaginary, untaxed, "unrealized" money is effectively realized at an opportunity cost of normal people still participating in the schmuck economy.
It's more complicated than that, of course, and it's not exactly "free money" - the house of cards could crumble - but that's the skinny of how it works.
This is why there's so much talk of taxing unrealized gains (as one example). They're trying to remove the game and force the wealthy back into the normal economy.
The rich initiated the changes but keep going 'what who me? They're just stocks' like it's 1940 when the public calls them out for it.
Seriously? I get why people would care less about immigration if they didn't think immigrants were stealing their jobs, but the culture war over LGBTQ rights and trans athletes hardly can be tied to some economic basis. If you spent any time interacting with conservatives you'd realize nobody is worried about LGBTQ people and trans athletes are stealing their jobs or whatever. They are worried about how LGBTQ/trans athletes are destroying the moral fabric of their society. Those concerns aren't going to evaporate just because everyone is fed and housed. If anything if they're more economically secure they'd be able to spend even more time on culture war issues.
The mistake is assuming that these issues rise into public debate entirely through grassroots, when really its more of a consequence of the incentive structures around politics in the US. The Democratic party doesn't want to upset their donors, but they need some issue to campaign on, rally support etc. And equal rights and such is all well and good, has been successful in the past, and played well with the base. The Republican party, also doesn't want to upset their donors, and opposing the Democrats on equal rights is easy to sell to their base.
As long as the game is about moving the ball of cultural/rights issues around, the wealthy win.
What about all the recent drama over the Epstein list, which comprise less than 0.01% of Americans?
Your math is way off. Epstein's list contains compromised people on positions of power who decide policy affecting 99% of Americans plus a lot of people around the world.
Compromised politicians, scientists and media figures can be used against the interests of more than 100% of Americans if we include wars and the damage done to foreigners.
The spin job that the elite class does is to argue that the bankers and CEOs are actually creating jobs and wealth, and the fault rests with those low-life poors/immigrants/socialists that are consuming more than they've earned. At its core, this is all about wealth and resource disparity.
>The vast majority of conservatives do not intrinsically hate the LGBTQ/immigrant/welfare
I consider myself anti-immigration (in some contexts). I have wonderful conservative friends. And yet, that said: It's plainly incorrect to use the term "vast majority" here. It's a believable opinion if you leave it at just immigrants, perhaps.
Politics is a complicated game that is easily lost over misjudged nuances. LGBTQ is different from immigrant/welfare and that's not even a nuance, the difference is fundamental.
It's the Democratic party that made LGBTQ a core and sore issue, knowing full well that it will undermine the rest of the left agenda and mislead their base to the point of blindness.
Tony Perkins (IIRC) was famous for preaching that God sends floods due to gay people specifically, until his own house flooded...
It's weird how they didn't seem to give one single shit about trans people until politicians and conservative media needed new boogeymen in 2015 after SCOTUS threw us a bone and couldn't use gay marriage/gay people as effective scapegoats any more.
It's almost if they where whipped up into yet another moral panic by people who have the platform and vested interest to distract them so they can be even more efficiently robbed blind economically, politically and socially.
there are weak spots, though. Luigi Mangione became a folk hero for murdering a CEO, with a lot of support across the political spectrum. likewise, the Epstein files getting suppressed seemed to agitate just about everyone. those fault lines weren't on the woke/anti-woke axis, they were on an elite/common axis. they were also harder to safely polarize the public on.
They say the quiet part out loud and make enemies out of the people their followers already don't like.
One of them had a media machine that painted them as Literally Tony Stark™ for two decades, with literal Iron Man cameos, and the other promises to hurt people with blue hair a lot.
What "media machine"? He only bought twitter in 2022, and even if he had a PR person or two, it can hardly be considered a "media machine" any more than some SMB with one or two social media interns has a "media machine".
Not by their consumer spending or how they live but given that SV billionaires have increasingly become politically activist with their vast sums of money, almost certainly.
Zuck - wanted to run for President as a Democrat
Laurene Powell - huge left wing donor
Google Founders - huge left wing donors
Eric Schmidt - led digital for Clinton, huge Obama backer
Ellison is the only right wing one of the group, the rest have just stepped back from politics, spending less (except Laurene)
Not to mention those just below the cutoff like Dustin Moskovitz.
Yes, I'm sure that once all of the wealth is held by a tiny fraction of the elites, they will successfully centrally plan the whole economy for maximum efficiency.
Source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/03/06/wealthiest-silicon-va...
A though exercise: If these 9 households moved to another city, the wealth inequality would improve. But what has actually been accomplished? Tax revenues would actually drop.
A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. If a small number of households have a lot of wealth, some people assume it must have been amassed by taking it from the other households. The more people believe in zero-sum thinking, the more egregious this feels.
ofcourse its zero sum. There are only so many natural resources to exploit. Zuckerberg owns like half of lake tahoe and Hawaii.
How many middle class people have the God-given divine right to rule and demand the sons of every nobleman to fight to keep and expand their power?
How many middle class people literally own a country and can dictate what happens in it from the top down? How many vineyards do middle class people own? How many garden hermits[1] do they keep on their estates simply for their ambience and kitsch?
The second thing you're referring to is power. Power I admit can be zero sum but most people are not ambitious in that way, they just want material wealth not political power.
Similarly, spending $10 at McDonald's is not the same thing as having teams of servants tending to your every whim every waking moment until you die.
If you can't see that clear difference, I don't think you're approaching this in good faith. You shouldn't have to stretch the truth this much to make your point if it's actually true and you know it.
I have air conditioning.
I have running water and a toilet.
I have antibiotics. And all sorts of other medicine that actually works.
When I have to get an operation done I can go under anesthesia rather than it being literal torture. And I won’t be killed by an infection resulting from the tiniest cut.
I have literally endless entertainment. More than I can ever consume in a lifetime.
I have access to just about any piece of information that has ever existed and been made public.
I don’t have to worry about being killed by an uprising.
I can go on.
I find Spanish castels from 1500-1600 to be pleasant enough temperature wise even when it's +35C outside.
You're comparing a ten dollar meal from McDonald's to a cooked meal by a team of professionals. Your comparison completely ignores the fact that in modern society you can absolutely have a meal cooked by a team of professionals or you can have McDonald's and you can decide moment to moment what you want, and all of it requires less outlay from you than it did 500 years ago, so it's available to practically everyone, not just the most wealthy.
500 years ago puts us in 1525, which is still in the transitional period of Medieval kingdoms becoming actual states. The kind of absolutism you're thinking about is still about 100-150 years away from coming to fruition. Medieval kings were almost entirely reliant on their vassals to be able to marshal any power whatsoever: if an important vassal decides he doesn't want to fight in the king's war, well, the king can't exactly force him (see e.g. the Burgundians in the Hundred Years' War--and this involves the most cohesive European monarchy!). You're starting to see efforts by 1525 to reduce the power of nobles to act independent of their liege, but they're certainly not there yet.
But keep in mind the other luxuries people today enjoy that the kings of 500 years ago can't. The ability to see all of your children survive until, well, your own death. The ability to eat, say, fresh strawberries in the height of winter. The ability to know your wife isn't going to die giving birth to another kid. Hell, pretty good odds your bed is larger than a king's bed from 500 years ago, and more comfortable too.
That would be good for billionaires because they can be the only ones that have access to those resources. See what is happening in lake tahoe.
As such, as parent stated, it's not a zero sum game. Zero sum assumes you can define the end state.
That being said, whether or not it's zero-sum is meaningless, and I don't take issue with arguing against the parent. Ultimately, the wealth-gap is widening to detrimental effect. The middle class is being divided into haves and have nots.
Whether you believe this is a problem, that's probably another type of discussion.
then why do we so much conservation and create all sorts of laws around it ?
Originally the late 60's, actually, according to Wikipedia.
The failure of Malthusian catastrophes to occur despite centuries of prediction hasn't dampened enthusiasm for predicting them to occur in the near future.
Excessive concentration of wealth has destructive consequences.
In the context of just Silicon Valley, what are they?
The destructive and unchecked accumulation of wealth in SV is what allowed the creation of monstrosities such as the gig economy and massive surveillance.
At the present moment in time it even allowed some tech oligarchs to directly influence elections in their favor, gaining access direct access to the high levels of government to have nugde government actions inntheir favor, curb regulatory interference that might put checks in their companies, etc.
I am presuming younasked from a position of ignorance rather than finding all this desirable somehow.
Most SV politicos that drive living conditions in the valley don't take PAC money and aren't affected by Billionaires. There's a housing shortage and a cost of living crisis anyway (example: no matter how much you pay gig economy workers, they are not going to afford a home in the valley).
The issues you mentioned are because of Citizens United - a federal issue w/ consequences all over the country (not just SV).
Yes, this is done through the government. While the government as an institution should be scrutinized and not necessarily get blind faith, it at least has the pretense of looking after the needs of the population.
This is the same dishonest line of reasoning as "there are children starving in Africa". That doesn't give the wealthy the right to take food from my children for themselves (indirectly speaking).
But you know that. The point is not to make an honest argument, but to oppress. I'm desperate for us to evolve past the point of making these immoral arguments against innocent people, pushing and pushing and pushing until something catastrophically breaks.
The most despicable wealthy are those that earned it via government coercion - they literally robbed their fellow citizens
People can be manipulated so that they give you money "voluntarily", but I wouldn't call that noble. Probably trillions of dollars are spent trying to manipulate people in various ways to try to convince them to give their money to the wealthy. Some of the most brilliant minds of humanity are working on how to use human psychology and technology to get people to do what they want. When an individual is up against that, I wouldn't call it entirely voluntary.
> The capitalist system has brought all of humanity higher than ever dreamed of by the wealthiest kings in centuries past.
All of humanity? No, millions still die of hunger. That's because their needs are invisible in a capitalist system, while the wants of those with wealth get the attention of everyone.
It is. Informing people about solutions to their problems is good, but advertising as it exists today is nothing more than manipulation in most cases.
> the idea that starving people existing negates the entire system we have which has proven to be successful
You said that capitalism has lifted all of humanity, but that is clearly not the case, not even in countries considered capitalist.
Yes, it absolutely has, and there is no example you can provide of a capitalist country providing a worse life than a non-capitalist country
Anyway, just because capitalism is the best we've come up with so far doesn't mean we can't do better. Would you look at the fastest car today and say "there's no example of a faster car you can provide, therefore this is the fastest car there can ever be". No, we can do better, especially with the technology we now have.
There is no alternative to letting people trade, which results in successful traders accumulating more than others. That’s it. There is no other system because it goes against human nature
It restricts your freedom of robbing others, of killing people, of not abiding by a contract, there are many "freedoms" you don't have that are necessary for society to function.
As the other comment mentioned, markets != capitalism, capitalism is a specific system to exploit markets but it doesn't mean it's the best way that will ever be found to provide incentives to produce what society wants or needs.
Quite impossible actually.
Therefore, if society wants free trade and free markets, it needs to prevent this. And the easiest way to do so is by making unbounded capital accumulation impossible, by refusing to acknowledge it as legitimate property right past a certain point, and thus withholding society's protections for it. It doesn't mean that all property rights are gone.
You have come to the exactly incorrect conclusions
It is. It's exploitation of the human mind, like a drug. It exists to hit the right triggers to open the gates of a person's decision making.
It's like a backdoor. Except, not really. Because the human mind is much easier to exploit than a computer.
We can do it very obviously, maybe with nicotine. But we don't even need substances. Just some bright lights and a bar you pull is enough to get people to drain their entire savings. You can even tell them "this doesn't work, you won't win" - it doesn't actually affect the exploit, because the exploit is occurring on a physiological, survival level, and logic is at a higher level than that. It's like trying to stop an active rootkit with Windows Defender.
Advertisement is gambling, but normalized. The goal is to develop an exploit to compel humans to work against their interests, to actively harm themselves in hopes of something they require.
It's typically simple things like joy or love. They might appeal to the innate desire for socialization, the innate need to be recognized and respected.
But, actually, you don't even need that. Even just exposing a brand image, over and over again, with no messaging creates an exploit. Now, they are primed to buy from you as opposed to competitors. Not based on logic, or even emotion - no, something much more intrinsic, much more fundamental to how neurons operate. Pattern recognition.
The exploit is so effective and deep-seated that you cannot even be aware if it has occurred, nor can you undo it. Some people believe the point of advertising is to get people to buy things. No, not at all. The point of advertising is for people to buy things all on their own, and make them believe it was done on their own accord. That's the golden goose. Any idiot can hold a gun to someone's head. But true manipulation doesn't require a gun.
50,000 people died by suicide in the USA in 2023. 12.8 million thought about it. 3.7 made a plan for it. 1.5 million attempted it. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
105,000 people died by overdose in the USA in 2023. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...
In 2023 the average daily incarceration population in the USA was 664,000. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2023-s...
Average daily homeless population for the USA in 2023 was 653,000. https://nlihc.org/resource/hud-releases-2023-annual-homeless...
In 2023 only 86% of US households were food secure. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
The majority of US bankruptcies (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530,000 medical bankruptcies annually. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/
American police kill more people than any other country at 1100 people a year. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/
I’d rather live in a conclave of billionaires, under my current standard of living, than be the richest man in the country living under the standards of 40 years ago.
Now, if they could live forever with that wealth, I’d probably change my mind. But that’s just fiction. Rich people die, some of them younger than I am.
You'd expect some divergence, but not nearly that much.
What is the point of the thought experiment? No one is asking them to _move_.
It is zero-sum. That's the correct way of thinking.
It may not be absolutely zero-sum, but it is effectively zero-sum. As in: The effects, problems, and solutions - in practice - are the same as is if it were zero-sum.
Of course! Why didn't we think of that?
Congrats on getting the first sarcastic comment out of me I believe in all my time on HN. What you've said is absolutely breathtaking.
What matters is how much cash you have relative to others, because that determines the actual purchasing power. So in a sense you're right in that the real problem isn't having billionaires, but that not everyone is one. But if everyone were one, there would be no reason to devalue the currency and drop the useless zeroes.
And, of course, the people who own those billions didn't make most of it. Some other people, who get paid salary or wages, did, with their labor. The guys who have the billions are those who collect economic rent from those who do the work.
You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.
yieldcrv•6mo ago
what?
how is moving minimum wage a dollar going to help someone tackle the $136,500 necessary to rent responsibly?
just seems like an odd thing to add. they’re still going to be commuting an hour like everyone else
smallerize•6mo ago
altairprime•6mo ago
Thank you for pointing out this correction and article! TIL.
> from $17.55 an hour to $17.95 come Jan. 1
> In the San Jose metropolitan area, as of earlier this year, [Living Wage Calculator estimates] about $32.87 for a single adult with no children
> Last year, the calculator estimated single adults needed to make $26.20
Elsewhere:
> The [CPI] inflation rate for the United States was 2.7% for the 12 months ending June
So, assuming the article’s figures are valid, it looks like San Jose’s minimum wage increased this year by around -1.5% (inflation-adjusted) or by around -20% (Living Wage adjusted), depending on which basis you use. If only San Jose had misread the inflation chart and mistakenly issued a one-month inflation increase rather than a one-year. Sigh.