Comment by petsfed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petsfed | Hacker News Reader

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Great, if only there were adequate jobs in those places, so we could all own homes without needing $300K annual family income.

The dissonance comes from the fact that a lot of hackernews readers make apparently high incomes, but the cost of living in their areas keeps them squarely working class.

The best example I can give is in the Bay Area. I lucked out with $2850/month to rent a 1400 square foot house in San Leandro. Except that I worked in South San Francisco, and my commute was 45 minutes to 90 minutes each way, every day. I looked into it, even did the math with average commute times and Health and Human Services housing cost data, and found that if I wanted to cut 15 minutes off of that commute would cost me an extra $1000 a month, or I'd lose the yard and the other bedroom. With a kid, a stay-at-home spouse (a lot cheaper than child care given wages for my wife's field in the bay area) and a dog, that was just a non-starter. I knew people who drove in from Vacaville or Tracey, every day, just to keep the housing prices within their means.

Prior to that experience, I honestly thought $140K a year was the best I could ever hope for. I was top 15% of individual wage earners in the country but I was considerably more stressed out than when I was making minimum wage at an office supply store in suburban Oregon.

In effect, your example demonstrates that a key effect of USA tech industry is taking vast amounts of customers' and tech investors' money and handing it over to California landlords / real estate investors.

Ever thought about maybe not living in California?

You don't need to be on the West Coast to have a tech job.

This is the thought which comes around often.

The problem is, for an intellectual, it's important to live in an environment rich with mental talent. Bay Area is the intellectual capital of the world, and while Einstein could maintain his patent clerkship and have famous physicists visit him in Bern (http://norvig.com/performance-review.html) for the lesser minds in another era settling on another place is a loss.

<s>Yes, because all universities in the US are in 5 places only. </s>

> Bay Area is the intellectual capital of the world,

Lol. Damn, the 0 interest rate era/tech bubble really made you guys cocky didnt it

Don't you know the greatest minds in the world are solving the extremely important problem of getting as many clicks on an ad as possible?

So your argument is the only place to find intellectual people to hang out with is the Bay Area?

I grew up surrounded by literally rocket scientists and some of the top minds in biochemistry and mechanical engineering as neighbors. Incredibly intellectual people. I did not grow up in California.

Its not like the Bay Area is the only place with smart people.

Bay Area is the intellectual capital of the world

Say what?

Switzerland (or possibly Slovenia) has the highest STEM PhDs per capita.

There are many counties and cities in the US with higher PhD rates than any of the Bay Area counties. Most have major R1 unis, but not all.

SV is the VC capital of the world. I'll give you that. But, that's not even remotely the same as being the intellectual capital.

I agree about as much with the idea that the Bay Area is the intellectual capital of the world as I do with the idea that "STEM PhDs per capita" is somehow a measure of intellect.

Sure. That was just a simple metric that popped into my head as a counterpoint to the absurd notion that SV is the intellectual capital of anything.

Hell, pockets of New Mexico have a higher number of PhDs per capita. The idea that SV is the intellectual center of the universe makes it sound like someone has been inside the bubble too long.

(And that’s not a knock on NM. I being it up as an example of an area that isn’t rarely bright up in these conversational circles)

Do phds make intellectual capital?

I'd assume the intellectual capital makes the most intellectual property

That assumption shows a very SV-centric mindset. Intellectual property is largely an legal economic construct. The PhDs in places like Los Alamos generally work more on classified projects. Your point is like saying the NSA must not have many smart people working there because they have no patents. Intellectual capital can create societal value being just dollars and cents.

For any city making the claim, there would be someone claiming it ridiculous.

There aren't many places where very smart people from all over the world move. New York is one, London used to be one, Bay Area is one. There are a lot of smart people in the bay area.

You're surrounded by the intellectuals who aren't clever enough to figure out how to surround themselves with brilliant people without paying the SF premium.

>The problem is, for an intellectual, it's important to live in an environment rich with mental talent.

My eyes rolled straight into the back of my head.

I agree that an 'intellectual' (as a social class construct) might require similar socially oriented individuals to feel like they're among equals. I have no respect for such 'intellectuals'. I have a great deal of respect for people who are curious about the world around them and love to make new and wonderful things and think novel ideas.

I find that those two groups rarely overlap.

My eyes rolled straight into the back of my head

Yeah, mine too. It's hard for me to take these kinds of arguments seriously in 2023. I'm willing to concede that geographic proximity was necessary for collaborative intellectual work, but the internet has changed that milieu. I also don't think it was true pre-internet, as Einstein himself showed.

Linus Torvalds didn't need to be in the Bay Area of California when he created the Linux kernel, yet it didn't happen without a massive amount of collaboration enabled by the internet. Solzhenitsyn, after he emigrated to the USA after getting deported by the Soviet Union, continued his intellectual work and writing in Cavendish, Vermont which was and is extremely isolated. And that was pre-internet!

It's a VC capital of the world, which has weak correlation with intellect.

No, it's the - the - intellectual capital of the world. I have reasons to think that, but you see here is not a good place for that discussion at the moment, too heated.

Maybe the discussion would be less heated if those reasons are compelling?

Maybe :) but to show compelling reasons would still take time and space, and also, I suspect, an effort to unlatch from a formed opinion. We're all just humans.

In a more lightweight form - what would you, as somebody interested in the matter, consider good criteria for "being the intellectual capital of the world" and what place would fit them?

> what would you, as somebody interested in the matter, consider good criteria for "being the intellectual capital of the world" and what place would fit them?

I'd say such a place would need to be geared toward minimizing anything that could hinder intellectual capacity. The SF Bay Area (as I learned firsthand) is not such a place; the constant stress of financial insecurity does not bode well for intellectual pursuits. I don't know if any such place really exists, for pretty much the same reason - certainly not here in the US.

In short, it'd need to be someplace where people could engage in intellectual pursuits for their own sake, and where the results of those pursuits are freely available to everyone - no censorship, no profit motives, no IP restrictions, nothing except the free creation and exchange of knowledge.

I firmly believe that any city which institutes a land value tax and uses it to fund a citizens' dividend / universal basic income is much more likely to become an intellectual capital than a city which does not. Land speculation is the major contributor to socioeconomic inequality and consequently the major obstacle preventing cities from being truly amenable to intellectual pursuits (rather than the current status quo of financial pursuits). Directly addressing it - by requiring landowners to internalize the opportunity costs they otherwise externalize onto the rest of society - is IMO the most crucial step toward allowing people to engage in intellectual pursuits without fear of failure and without being bound by concerns like profitability.

Culturally, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston strike me as good candidates once they address the above; the first of those three to implement LVT+UBI is the one I'd bet on becoming the "intellectual capital of the world". I'm personally hoping Reno evolves into such a candidate, but that's one hell of a long shot :)

I live in Reno. A past employer insisted that I relocate from Reno to SF for a new position, so I did.

What I learned very quickly is that it's rather difficult to stay intellectually engaged when even a six-figure salary is paycheck-to-paycheck living in a studio apartment.

I moved back to Reno shortly before COVID, and since doing so I've found myself to be much more productive. The "intellectual capital of the world" can shove it.

I was living happily in Wyoming when my employer said "move to California, or find another job" which, if you don't know the Wyoming economy, translated to "leave Wyoming for us, leave Wyoming for somebody else, or go work in a coal mine".

That's interesting but unfortunate. To me, the goal would be to do just that: live in Wyoming but work for a coastal tech employer.

Why a “coastal” tech employer?

The wages in SV price in the cost of living to a certain extent. I’m assuming if the remote work pattern continues, we can’t be expected to make coastal salaries while living in rural Wyoming any more that we would expect a FAANG company to pay an overseas employee SV salaries.

I work in embedded systems, firmware and hardware. Unfortunately, I've got a solid decade of professional development before I can justify going freelance competitively. The thousands of dollars in test equipment is quite the barrier.

But even if I wasn't in a field that requires time spent hands-on with the physical hardware, a lot of companies (my former employer in the Bay Area amongst them) insist on in-person work for most positions, even if the position doesn't really require it. And so it goes, people making $60K in Wichita or wherever glibly say "I can get a house for $180K, you make 5 times what I make, complaining about million dollar homes is just a rich person lacking perspective". Even if you do the math and show that holy cow, homes are expensive in tech hubs, even considering the median income, all people see is how high the median income, and assume that there's no real problem.

I get that. Wyoming sure can be beautiful and full of certain opportunities but embedded software isn't often one of those.

There are markets other than California and Wyoming though. I'm sure you're aware, but its always good to compare compensation versus living expenses. Almost every time I've been given a chance to move it meant I'd be trading my lifestyle in a negative direction (from my perspective) and smaller savings in the end even if the salary was over 2x my current. Everyone has their own priorities in life though, I hope you find a way to achieve yours.

Good luck in life friend.

I ended up in the Seattle area, and I'm pretty happy with it.

I'm still frustrated by the high price of housing, because I fundamentally agree with the thesis of the article: housing, especially single-family housing, should not be expected to appreciate faster than inflation. To that end, so long as my house's worth when the mortgage is paid off (on a 30-year mortgage) is about double when I first bought it, I'll be happy.

I don't share the article's glum outlook. I think if enough people can be convinced that houses aren't, and shouldn't be, viewed as money-makers but just, you know, houses, this problem can be solved. I understand that's a pretty radical and utopia position to take though.

If any industry is poised well to make relatively high pay anywhere, it’s tech. It’s speculation on my part, but I assume tech has one of the highest remote work percentages.

This is a phenomenon that is prevalent in other industries, without that remote work luxury. Oil and gas workers get paid handsomely but often have to live near the worksite. Even then, rent is astronomical without all the luxuries that SV offers.

Don’t you think the amount of remote work has changed that?

I think part of the problem is the presumed loss aversion of moving from a $300k salary to, say, a $175k one that is remote but allows for a better standard of living (particularly for families).

You say this as if getting a fully remote job that pays $175k is easy to come by… I’d guess that most people making $300k in high-priced areas would take this paycut to $175k every day of the week and twice on sunday if they were offered

This just doesn't make sense to me. The employer can hire two instead of one while getting the same performance. Supposing we're not talking about 8+ hours timezone difference, it's much more valuable than just having someone physically in the office!

I keep wanting to think this way as well, but then I am reminded that there are more costs for a position than just the salary most of the time. Lots of administrative overhead. I don't know actual numbers, but it's probably more of a conversion of one position into two for 30-40% of the salary at best.

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