[0x8BADF00D]

> Obscene wealth next to in your face poverty is nothing new, nor particularly special about SF.

It is common in developing/third world nations. Income inequality is a hallmark of such nations. It would seem that the United States has dropped from a first world (creditor) nation to a third world (debtor) nation. It is a fairly recent phenomenon with very real and easily explainable reasons, which the article states numerous times over.

[closeparen]

Any decent-sized US city has its share both wealth and poverty, but most are dominated by postwar development, so the two are separated by miles of freeway rather than feet of sidewalk.

Where inequality seems worse, you are probably seeing a successful progressive effort to prevent segregation, and vice versa. When your neighbors and everyone you encounter in daily life are all in roughly the same economic shape as you, that doesn't mean you're living in an egalitarian society. Quite the opposite.

[rsj_hn]

You have triggered me, so I will rant a bit about the Fallacy of Equality of All Good Things.

Let me explain:

   * Fallacy 1: First/third world = Creditor/Debtor

The financial hubs are always debtor countries, because the periphery wants to accumulate their reserves. So when England was the dominant financial power it always ran a trade deficit as everyone else wanted to acquire pound-denominated assets, which is a roundabout way of saying they wanted to be creditors to the UK. This allowed consumption goods from all over the world to flow into the UK while the rest of the world used the proceeds to acquire pound claims.

When the U.S took over, everyone started accumulating dollar assets, meaning they were creditors to the US. How did they achieve this magical feat? It's pretty easy, they just made their currencies a bit undervalued relative to the currency of the core. Nations can trash their own currencies pretty easily -- there is only a political downside, but if you can convince your countrymen to tighten their belts in exchange for being a creditor nation, then all the better, especially if you really need a reserve with which to buy foreign inputs. In other cases, they were not very democratic to begin with, so it wasn't an issue.

This is also true if you study local financial flows within a country -- a major urban area will be a debtor area and the poorer, smaller region around it will be a creditor to it, which is just another way of saying money flows out of the city and consumption goods flow into it from the land around. If you compare how much a person in a city consumes per day versus how much a person in the periphery consumes, we in the core consume quite a bit more. Restaurants, bars, custom shoes, concerts, museums -- we really live it up! How can money just flow out of a city without a printing press there? Because the periphery re-invests by purchasing assets in the core, recycling the money. So if you live in a farm or small town you will have a retirement account with stock or bonds that are claims on companies in the core -- the money you save is being sent back to the core rather than being invested in some other small town -- thus the periphery is a creditor to the core. This is true for cities as well as nations. This phenomena of net trade inflows to big cities was even true of Ancient Rome and Ancient Athens, but there it was pretty obvious that rather than having the farmers invest their money in Rome stocks, they were just taxed the loot was brought into Rome. The developed urban core is always a consumption sink while the more rural periphery tightens its belt.

This does not mean that the core is third world and the periphery is first world -- it means the opposite!

   * Fallacy 2: strong currency = export power. 

There is a similar fallacy with being an export power and having a "strong" currency. People like to have a "strong" currency -- e.g. who prefers weakness to strength? But people also like to be net exporters, because they want to make more income selling goods to others than they spend buying goods from others. But the stronger your currency, the more expensive your product and you become a net importer. Because assets in the core are somewhat overvalued relative to the periphery that the core is a net importer. You can see this by comparing interest rates in the periphery versus the core.

But you often hear people demanding both a strong currency and being an export power. And sometimes they throw in first world and net creditor to boot. Even though these good things are the opposites of each other. You have to pick and choose -- do you want to export a lot with an artificially weak currency, or import a lot with an artificially strong currency? Do you want to be a financial hub and thus a debtor or a smaller node orbiting the hub and thus a creditor? You can pick and choose what you want, but you can't have it all.

Here endeth my rant on the fallacy of Equality of All Good Things.