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Comment by hkarthik | Hacker News Reader

There's another phenomenon at work in the cities which is driving the Delivery startups today: the availability of a large labor pool of people who now do these jobs to survive.

In India, the following lower caste laborers have been doing business with their mobile phones for at least a decade:

* Laundry/Dry cleaners

* Drivers

* Grocery Delivery

* Home cleaning

These folks have been doing the same work for a long time, and as cell phones got cheap in India they just started using them. Their standard of living may have gotten better, but their social standing really has not.

In my occasional travels to SF, I am starting to see a similar caste system emerge. And it's pretty depressing.

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To be fair, that's not caste system.. better phrase would be income inequality or unskilled labor.

Keep telling yourself that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...

The bay area has the greatest social mobility in the US: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/

Having the "greatest" value in a set of really small values doesn't mean much.

I wouldn't say it's that small a value. If there was no relevance to where you started in the life, the odds of reaching the top 5th from the bottom 5th would be 20%. 12+% is where San Jose and San Francisco stack up, which seems pretty spectacular considering all the potential factors pushing against someone.

I stand corrected - I am from the midwest and didn't realize SF was so much higher than the US average in terms of socio-economic mobility.

It's not. Young people with no money move here (like to any other city) from Podunk and make their way up the ladder. If they're in tech, the end point is much higher and you get there faster.

You're not going to see a Tenderloin drug addict or one of the Mexican day laborers waiting outside Home Depot make their fortune here. Nor will you see someone like Kevin Rose reduced to working at Burger King, however much value he destroys.

Your original comment was very much on the mark.

This jives more with my personal experiences in visiting SF, but I'm no expert. Seems that a few silent downvoters still disagree.

That's true, but that's the case pretty much everywhere. The difference here is that the Mexican day labourer's son/daughter can learn to code at school and completely change their fortune by the time they are 22.

That's pretty significant. In a small town in Minnesota, people won't follow that path because it would be completely outside their experience. Not so here.

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