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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The kleptocracy is busy amassing farmland and water rights while pitching that Android 16 is "wealth".
Fuck them. And you? Think critically, these memes have consequences.
Real estate is the classic example, true, but precious metals? They’re zero sum in one sense, but what do you think mining does? It increases the supply and effectively amount of precious metals in the world. Same for drilling for oil I guess, though I don’t really want to defend of encourage that, but, it’s still not exactly zero sum, even if I don’t like it, because you can’t just count wealth that’s inaccessible as equivalent to wealth that is accessible. So 3 of your 4 examples are perfect examples that wealth is NOT really zero sum at all. And you can’t eat those. So what about food? Food production has been increased… what, 500x maybe in the last 100 years via agricultural technology investment and science. That’s a lot fewer people starving or going hungry… admittedly we now have the opposite problem via obesity epidemic, but, now here comes GLP-1 innovation which… also increases wealth? Wealth is a pretty tricky thing to define but if people are paying money for it voluntarily it seems to qualify.
Excessive concentration of wealth has destructive consequences.
In the context of just Silicon Valley, what are they?
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
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.
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•3h 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•3h ago
altairprime•2h 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.