The wealth inequality debate is about Bezos and wall street ceo's type thing - I don't think many people have issue with some making $50k and others making $200k.
At the end of the day Bezos makes headlines but his personal largesse has very little effect on most people in the country. It has very little impact on the lives of folks getting "pushed out" of SF. That's the folks he employs.
This is primarily attributable to two causes:
1. distorted views that result directly from inequality and the extreme poverty some communities have: to the (stereo)typical Tenderloin resident, as person who is able to afford a modest 3/2 townhome appears to be vastly wealthy
2. the mistaken view of techies, themselves, as being in the same class as those who actually are wealthy, and presenting as such (including the disaffected/indifferent attitude towards those in even lower socioeconomic brackets), which reinforces (1)
> At the end of the day Bezos makes headlines but his personal largesse has very little effect on most people in the country. It has very little impact on the lives of folks getting "pushed out" of SF. That's the folks he employs.
That's so out of line with actual reality it's best classified as "not even wrong." I don't even know where to begin with it. The people pushing others out in SF are not Bezos' employees; they're a tiny, tiny fraction of tech workers, most of whom won a VC/IPO lottery.
Bezos and his social class benefit immensely from the lower socioeconomic classes in-fighting. For example, by some thinking paying a laborer more will lead to more inequality.
Unless you believe--quite wrongly--that SWEs aren't in the bottom....
See: https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...
Look at the wage growth for the 90th - 95th (top 10% to top 5%): it's in the bottom.
The distribution of salary for Senior SWE is found, e.g., at https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/senior-soft.... The median is $115k, the 90% is $130k--still not the top 10%. Even when you bonuses the salary curve shifts right by less than 10% (e.g. median goes to about $116k, 90% outlier to $138k).
Some 4 million people in the US work as software engineers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...). FAANG accounts for, what, 1% - 2% of that? Maybe a bit more, but not much. The vast majority don't have high TC, most of them are paid a flat salary with a modest bonus and either have ESPPs or no equity at all.
Software engineers are laborers, in effectively the same social class as manual laborers. Our economic circumstances are better, but not that much better.
Your comment is a great example of how the huge inequality gaps and the infotainment media have distorted perceptions among workers.
They became rich the moment they entered the bay area. So hating on the "rich techies" is really misguided and will only further increase inequality.
Pushed out is a misnomer, really. If you have a booming housing market you should invest into more housing. These "rich" people will take the luxury apartments in 3 story buildings and the existing residents can keep their housing.
These things are not mutually incompatible. You just need to give one side what they need and they will leave you alone.
If you think through it, the billionaires don't have all that much real resource to be used - eg, J. Bezos owns an island in Hawaii. So say the government takes his island off him and redistributes it to low-wage earners in New York - they can't actually use the island for anything. They'd sell their stake in it and go for real resources locally. The actual real resources they consume are going to be made up for by the upper-middle class having less.
If anything is done about income inequality, it is probably going to involve bringing the above-median types more into line with the below-median earners. There aren't many ways around that - low earners need real resources, not paper money. Billionaires tend not to have the amount of real resources that are needed.
That is not necessarily true if you can produce more of the resource. The extra money would drive up prices and thus make it more profitable to run a company that offers the resource. Housing is artificially restricted but the technology to build denser housing exists. Taking the island is not really a sound strategy though, because it is much more efficient to just borrow money and give it to people through government stimulus. CPI inflation will eat at the value of unproductive capital like the island away on its own.
>If anything is done about income inequality, it is probably going to involve bringing the above-median types more into line with the below-median earners.
There is no meaningful difference between lowering the top and raising the bottom. Wealth tends to flee easily so increasing the bottom is a more reliable strategy. CPI inflation is generally a force that does both at the same time.