There's an irritatingly prevalent attitude that once you've moved to a high cost of living area (or were born there), you're forever entitled to stay there. That if you can't afford it, it's the fault of society and needs to be corrected.
I'm not saying that means people who can't afford to live in places like NYC or SF shouldn't move, just that there's a complex tension between economic theory and "messy" human reality.
The ideal rationally self-interested agent described in economics texts would just move from place to place in search of profit-maximising opportunities, but that's not what actually existing humans do much of the time. They have relatives, friends, aesthetic preferences, social obligations, religious beliefs, and other things that "do not compute" in mathematical models.
They compute fine -- most models are just "lying with math" by excluding the value of those things from their calculations.
It's not different than a friend who ignores those things when using words -- of course it doesn't make sense why you don't move if you don't account for the full value of where you are at present.
I think if we accounted for the destroyed social value that most of these economic models have inflicted, it would be the obvious massive negative that most people anecdotally tell. I think it's very telling how rarely you see these kinds of things modeled in economic theory despite how obviously part of the way humans value things they are.
Economics is merely institutionalized fixation on money, and produces precisely the psychopathic models you'd expect from that.
"You can't argue with the math!"
"Well, hold on now, I think you left a whole bunch of things out!"
If you don't know where the problem in the math is, despite there being an extremely obvious problem, many people will ignore your objections. That's why they use math, to paper over their obviously poor behavior.
Being able to strip that bare is useful.
It seems to me we'd do better taking an empirical approach and pricing in widespread psychological realities.
For instance, it's clear that one of the things people don't do very well with, especially as they head into middle age and beyond, is big downward adjustments in lifestyle. It just doesn't accord with the expectation of upward mobility and progression through life anywhere, least of all in the land of the American Dream.
So, even when economic circumstances get worse, their spending tends to remain stubbornly high relative to the quantitative reality. It seems to me sanctimoniously chiding people for that is not a constructive response. It's clearly what most people do, in some measure. The question is how to best deal with that systemically, if in any way at all.
You might be able to afford a better lifestyle on a modest paycheck in Sioux City, Iowa, but what happens when that company, the approximately ~1 serious tech employer in town, lays you off? In the Bay Area, you just go across the street.
Lest anyone think I'm a cheerleader, I live in northeast Georgia and have no intention of moving to the Bay Area. :-)
True. We aren't around "900 of the world's top 1000" companies, but in the 20 years I've lived here, I've never found there to be a lack of development jobs.
As a single person, you could easily live comfortably in parts of metro Atlanta making 70K.
I agree that metro Atlanta is not an especially high-cost area, though parts of it certainly are; ITP in general is getting overheated. I lived in Midtown for the better part of ten years and by the end of that, rents seemed on par with Brooklyn and Chicago, though I did have to upgrade from single-person housing on account of a short-lived marriage.
Nowadays, I've moved back to Athens. Where are you?
Salary.com is seems pretty much in line with my experience.
Benefits may be better at a larger company but salaries are about the same.
Even so, don't complain that you can't live off of 100K. They are purposefully making lifestyle choices that the median household making 70K a year can't make.
I agree!