> it's not comparing Americans of different classes. It's comparing Americans at different stages of life. Or just the ebb and flow of income over and individual's life
no, what we should really measure is property, ownership. the richest people pay little to no income. many years ago, before i learned about today's economic system, i remember being impressed upon hearing that Steve Jobs only took a $1 salary. now i know this is just incredibly beneficial tax-wise (along with a bunch of other tricks that aren't available to the non-propertied class).
seriously all this talk about 'measuring income' or whatever is just a distraction from the underlying property systems and relations in our current system.
"In the coming years you’ll read a lot of columns agonising over how to ‘fix’ Silicon Valley. Most will be technocratic, evacuating politics from the discussion. This is, after all, the framing that allowed Silicon Valley to grow so powerful in the first place: a binary choice between technological development on capital’s terms, or remaining stuck in the past. But structural problems require structural solutions. Rather than relying on ‘ethical’ founders or investors to change the system, we need collective action to challenge it.
This will mean undoing the labyrinth of intellectual property rights, which are intended to protect corporations and commodify information. It will mean revisiting the funding model that gave rise to the ‘go-big-or-go-home’ culture responsible for so many wasteful start-ups, shifting away from the return-driven venture capital model, and towards a state-backed social entrepreneurship with public responsibilities.
It will also mean building worker power, within the tech industry and beyond it. Within it, the long-term goal must be a union culture encompassing all workers involved in production. That means not just the highly-paid software engineers but contractors packing boxes for Amazon, or driving for Uber, or cleaning offices in Silicon Valley should all have representation in decision-making structures. And beyond the confines of the industry, a wider-organised labour movement needs to offer resistance to technology being used to facilitate increased worker exploitation through surveillance or regulatory arbitrage.
None of this will be easy, of course. Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of technology will require prying it from the clutches of capital. But that is a worthy fight. If the task of politics is to imagine a different world, then the job of technology is to help us get there. Whether technology is developed for the right ends — for the public good, instead of creating a privatised dystopia — will depend on the outcome of political struggles."
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley