Hacker News Reader

Comment by dreamdu5t | Hacker News Reader

> Income inequality is growing ever worse, and it is increasingly clear that one of the forces fueling this trend is the technological innovation flowing out of the Bay Area.

This claim is unsubstantiated. By what mechanism is Facebook causing income inequality?

View on HN

Income inequality is, by definition, the gap between those with lower and higher earnings.

So if Facebook et al. pay higher salaries, and other salaries don't increase, then income inequality increases.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it seems obvious that soaring tech salaries will increase inequality.

By that logic, the other industries are causing income inequality by not increasing their salaries.

Certainly true. I note that this is causing the "good" half of income inequality, though: the "some people are getting richer" part, not the "other people are getting poorer or staying the same" part.

(I digress, but: we all agree that given three different possible worlds, A, B, and C, where in A, everyone's poor, in B, most people are poor and some are rich, and in C, everyone's rich, C is the best, and A is the worst, right? Nobody's here to argue that A is better than B?)

To the extent that you can draw a causal line from "tech boom" to the bad half of income inequality (the "lots of people are getting poorer or stagnating" part), it's more about "wealth gets tied up in companies that just intrinsically employ fewer people than the labor-intensive manufacturing companies of the mid 20th Century."

For example: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bus-is-a-sign-of-silic... or more succinctly http://www.sfgate.com/living/article/Why-we-re-invisible-to-...

Private buses don't cause income inequality. Your income is not the result of other people driving private buses to work. If it is a result of that, you need to show how... not link to articles bitching about how people drive private buses.

I beg to differ. Do you think a single mother of 4 can easily afford to commute to somewhere in the South Bay to get a better paying job?

No, but neither is a Facebook employee commuting on the company bus causing that single mother of 4's poverty, if that's what you're suggesting? Because that's the point of the post you're begging to differ with.

No, but private buses are indicative of how people in the tech economy are effectively shielded from dealing with the same issues of other people- the private buses are a symbol of the bubble they live in, and the callous behavior of that Googler is a symbolic example of someone stuck in that bubble. I suppose one takeaway is that it shows that the Google doesn't do more to encourage its employees to patronize public transportation.

And a more speculative idea- maybe large tech corporations should use their influence and power to encourage the cities that host them to reform. The Bay Area has a notoriously shoddy and inefficient public transportation system relative to a metropolis of its size and wealth. Maybe giving back to the communities through ways such as that, they could engage with the Bay, not just create bubbles within it.

> I suppose one takeaway is that it shows that the Google doesn't do more to encourage its employees to patronize public transportation.

Google and its employees have no obligation to patronize public transportation, nor do you.

> The Bay Area has a notoriously shoddy and inefficient public transportation system relative to a metropolis of its size and wealth.

That would be nice, but the shitty public transportation system built, operated, managed, and owned by the government is not the fault or responsibility of Google and friends. Google is not the reason it's a piece of shit either.

> Maybe giving back to the communities through ways such as that, they could engage with the Bay, not just create bubbles within it.

Google is the top philanthropist in the Bay Area giving $27.6 million to charities here in 2010.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2011/07/22/goog...

What solution, if any, do you propose?

I'm not. I'm proposing that Google is not the cause of other people's personal income and transportation problems.

It's not just an income problem. As the article points out, prices for food have been going up because the tech engineers can afford the higher prices. This makes food more difficult for everyone else to get.

Yes, the article claims such without presenting any evidence or substantiating the claim in any way. Where is the study linking rise in tech worker wages to increases in burrito prices? Oh right... there is none. Burritos in the mission are no more expensive than burritos in Santa Rosa, CA. They're $7-9 anywhere in Northern California.

'The unkindest cut of all? Food writer John Birdsall returned from a Portland, Ore., food festival and reported that the Bay Area’s vaunted “populist craft foods” scene might be as “extinct as the $1,500 flat.”'

linked article here: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2013/09/why_portlands_food_...

> Google and its employees have no obligation to patronize public transportation, nor do you.

Of course not. This is a free country. Of the developed world, we probably put the among least obligations on corporations. But I'm not talking about legal obligations. I'm talking about a social responsibility. Just because you don't have to, doesn't mean you shouldn't.

> That would be nice, but the shitty public transportation system built, operated, managed, and owned by the government is not the fault or responsibility of Google and friends. Google is not the reason it's a piece of shit either.

Of course not, It's largely the fault of an ingrained culture of NIMBYism that drives city and county governments to reject greater expansion of public transportation, coupled with budget cuts, a car culture, and so on. But my speculation is that with their wealth, companies like Google, Facebook, and others, can possibly place influence on those gov'ts to shift their attitudes, at least gradually.

> Google is the top philanthropist in the Bay Area giving $27.6 million to charities here in 2010.

For which they certainly should be lauded for. And which is a good start. But I'm sure there are more ways that corporations can give back to communities other than employing their populations and giving money for charity.

Talk of obligation and responsibility requires further philosophical grounding than mere outright claims.

It's difficult to comprehend how a bus has turned into a symbol of oppression, although I guess there is a history of that being the case in this country. In this particular instance, though, I'm sure people would be equally unhappy with the resulting traffic and gridlock if all of the bus riders started driving their cars instead. The difference is that there wouldn't be a big object which says "Bauers" on the side of it which people could use as the poster child for income inequality.

The sad truth is that Google, Facebook, et al. wouldn't easily be able to navigate the byzantine system of transit organizations that comprise the Bay Area. For Google, that would mean dealing with Muni, SamTrans and VTA and maybe Caltrain and the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board. That's a pretty difficult tangle of bureaucracy to deal with. It's easier to just provide your own private transit company.

One thing they could do which would go a long way to allaying the vitriol would be to allow non-employees to make use of the bus. That would further decrease traffic and would make it seem like the service was more equitable. The problem of course is that we live in a litigious society and there may be problems with insurance or other factors.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Facebook-Salaries-E40772.htm

Linking to an average of Facebook salaries is not an explanation for why people being paid to work at Facebook is determinate of other people's income.

by amount of employees compared to market valuation. kodak vs instagram.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com