Adding up all of the wealth in a small region and then calculating wealth inequality against a small number of households makes for some triggering headlines, but it’s not a very useful metric for anything in the real world.
A though exercise: If these 9 households moved to another city, the wealth inequality would improve. But what has actually been accomplished? Tax revenues would actually drop.
A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. If a small number of households have a lot of wealth, some people assume it must have been amassed by taking it from the other households. The more people believe in zero-sum thinking, the more egregious this feels.
All that matters is what you can purchase and what lifestyle you can afford. Despite living in supposed Dickensian-levels of inequality there is no better time in world history to be alive, by a long shot, and our poorest have it better than ever before
It is zero-sum. That's the correct way of thinking.
It may not be absolutely zero-sum, but it is effectively zero-sum. As in: The effects, problems, and solutions - in practice - are the same as is if it were zero-sum.
The total sum of all natural resources has yet to be discovered. We were supposed to hit peak oil in what, the 1990's? Trees are on a dramatic decline, but they still exist. No one can correctly or meaningfully count the amount of natural resources left in total existence. And when there's scarcity, another solution tends to emerge as substitute.
As such, as parent stated, it's not a zero sum game. Zero sum assumes you can define the end state.
That being said, whether or not it's zero-sum is meaningless, and I don't take issue with arguing against the parent. Ultimately, the wealth-gap is widening to detrimental effect. The middle class is being divided into haves and have nots.
Whether you believe this is a problem, that's probably another type of discussion.
It's not zero sum if we regulate these resources. The sun provides low entropy which we can convert to an increasing stockpile of wealth. The problem is how we've decided to distribute it, and whether we can successfully transition to mining our local solar system.
While they are perhaps paying large amounts of local taxes, are these taxes in the same proportion as those of lesser wealth and are these taxes in proportion to their influence? For most wealthy people, taxes are an afterthought given the tax breaks they have access to.
The point is that SV is packed to the brim with very wealthy people, so this is a demonstration of the scale of the wealth inequality, which is something people tend to have difficulty wrapping their heads around.
This is not unique to SV. This is happening world over. The wealthier are buying more assets, the middle and lower classes are left paying rent to the wealthy landowners. "Gary's Economics" has tons of material on wealth inequality and its impacts.
Do billionaires affect the area they live in much? I imagine they'd mostly just have a compound in an already rich area, and not interact with the general area much. And then be travelling to other houses of theirs or for business frequently?
>Do billionaires affect the area they live in much?
Not by their consumer spending or how they live but given that SV billionaires have increasingly become politically activist with their vast sums of money, almost certainly.
> While the data does not name individuals, it is not hard to find the list of billionaires who call the region home: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and businesswoman and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs in Palo Alto, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Los Altos, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and financier George Roberts in Atherton, and Ubiquiti Networks founder Robert Pera in San Jose, are the richest nine in the two counties, according to the group’s analysis of a Forbes list.
I know it's not the point of this important article. But I had no idea about Robert Pera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera - kind of inspiring. Only millennial on the list that is not Zuck. And not gon' lie my instagram was similar to https://www.instagram.com/__rjp__/ for a while - seems like a semi-regular selfie with dog in car type of person. Did better financially though than most lol.
What a disappointment that this “Silicon Valley Pain Index”—where the pain consists of things like high rents and homelessness—is headlined with an irrelevant scapegoat of 9 billionaires. The 9 billionaires named in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525) do not own the vast majority of residential zoned land and are not active in land use politics as far as I know. It’s the few hundred thousand millionaires who use regulatory capture (zoning) to prevent abundant multifamily housing.
You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.
Readit News
A though exercise: If these 9 households moved to another city, the wealth inequality would improve. But what has actually been accomplished? Tax revenues would actually drop.
A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. If a small number of households have a lot of wealth, some people assume it must have been amassed by taking it from the other households. The more people believe in zero-sum thinking, the more egregious this feels.
You'd expect some divergence, but not nearly that much.
It is zero-sum. That's the correct way of thinking.
It may not be absolutely zero-sum, but it is effectively zero-sum. As in: The effects, problems, and solutions - in practice - are the same as is if it were zero-sum.
What is the point of the thought experiment? No one is asking them to _move_.
ofcourse its zero sum. There are only so many natural resources to exploit. Zuckerberg owns like half of lake tahoe and Hawaii.
As such, as parent stated, it's not a zero sum game. Zero sum assumes you can define the end state.
That being said, whether or not it's zero-sum is meaningless, and I don't take issue with arguing against the parent. Ultimately, the wealth-gap is widening to detrimental effect. The middle class is being divided into haves and have nots.
Whether you believe this is a problem, that's probably another type of discussion.
Dead Comment
https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/policy-projects/svpi/index.php
Not by their consumer spending or how they live but given that SV billionaires have increasingly become politically activist with their vast sums of money, almost certainly.
Zuck - wanted to run for President as a Democrat
Laurene Powell - huge left wing donor
Google Founders - huge left wing donors
Eric Schmidt - led digital for Clinton, huge Obama backer
Ellison is the only right wing one of the group, the rest have just stepped back from politics, spending less (except Laurene)
Not to mention those just below the cutoff like Dustin Moskovitz.
Source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/03/06/wealthiest-silicon-va...
You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.