[taxyz]

You forgot the part where a lot of these big companies are still making buckets of cash and now those buckets are distributed amongst fewer people within the company further straining inequality, especially considering investors are generally rewarding companies for their reductions in force.

10,000 software developers losing their jobs in SF or Palo Alto are not going to make either of those areas affordable. Facebook's stock increasing in value 175% in 1 year is likely going to push some engineers into home buying compensation territory and the ones that can will start bidding wars for houses.

I'm not actually taking too much of a side here but its interesting how you view the ZIRP and VC industry as drivers of inequality as if VCs throwing enough money at startups so that some late 20s/early 30s person can make 180k/yr (plus some largely valueless equity) is the real problem. If anything VCs have made capital accessible to a class of people that would have otherwise been kept out of the party. During downturns and high interest rate periods, incumbents and bigger companies do well as they can weather the storm and buy up more of the market at a discount.

Even if you could drive up the interest rates to the point that these "generous endowments from VCs" and large companies cease to exist, the restaurant worker in SF won't start thriving. VC funding subsidized a lot of people's lifestyles in SF including the restaurant worker. There is not a substitute for building more housing.

[dventimihasura]

>You forgot the part where a lot of these big companies are still making buckets of cash

I can't forget something that's not a fact and wouldn't be relevant if it were. A lot of companies did make a lot of cash. Also, a lot didn't. Moreover, revenue is not profitability. Generally speaking, unprofitable firms will find it harder to survive than profitable ones will, without financing.

> you view the ZIRP and VC industry as drivers of inequality

Who ever said that was my view? I never said that. What I said in another comment is that ZIRP and VC funding are were factors that contributed to income inequality. As someone who benefited from that arrangement, I would like to believe otherwise. Unfortunately for me, I don't. Give me a good reason to and maybe I will.

[taxyz]

> I can't forget something that's not a fact

Putting aside your arrogance for a moment: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/META:NASDAQ?window=1Y https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MSFT:NASDAQ?window=1Y https://www.google.com/finance/quote/AMZN:NASDAQ?window=1Y

have seen increased profit and profit margins over the last year as well as huge increases in their stock prices. Not sure how you don't find that relevant in a discussion about income inequality but I also don't find anything else you said very compelling.

This isn't a thought experiment you have to run, there is actual data. All things considered VC's and high salaries for workers willing to take on risk has generally been good for SF. Look at other areas with similar politics and no VC funding and you don't see restaurant workers thriving. Portland's inequality has gotten worse and the livability for service workers has gone down even though its not a major benefactor of VC funding or ZIRP. If you removed all VC funding from SF, a lot of those restaurant jobs disappear. Tech workers making a middle class living off of investment money shouldn't be demonized. SF leadership and housing policy is your issue.

[dventimihasura]

> Putting aside your arrogance for a moment

Let's put aside making and taking things personally, shall we? One way to do that is by sticking to the relevant facts, so here's a relevant fact: two of those three companies aren't Bay Area companies. All three of them aren't even San Francisco companies. I think that's relevant if we're talking about San Francisco.

> All things considered VC's and high salaries for workers willing to take on risk has generally been good for San Francisco

That's a matter of judgment. If, say, a SFUSD teacher makes a different judgment because she has to commute from Tracy, I'm not going to say she's wrong.

> Tech workers making a middle class living off of investment money shouldn't be demonized

Who has demonized them? I haven't. I haven't made a moral judgment about this at all. I'm just arguing that economic policy and conditions tend to lead to predictable outcomes, and if we want different outcomes we should choose different policies.