Silicon Chasm: The class divide on America’s cutting edge

for some reason, the third page has most of the content.

This was posted on 2 AM PST. Give the discussion a couple hours.

Cowen bluntly predicted what he called “wage polarization.” The increasing ability of computers to perform ordinary tasks will inexorably transform America into an income oligarchy in which the top 15 percent of people—with skills “that are a complement to the computer”—will enjoy “cheery” labor-market prospects and soaring incomes, while the bottom 85 percent, that is to say, 267 million out of America’s 315 million people, will be lucky to find Walmart-level jobs or scrape together marginal “freelance” livings running $25-a-pop errands for their betters via TaskRabbit (say, picking up and delivering a pair of designer shoes from Nordstrom) or renting out their spare bedrooms (if they have any) to overnight lodgers via Airbnb. That is, if they’ll be working at all. “There are many other historical periods, including medieval times, where inequality is high, upward mobility is fairly low, and the social order is fairly stable, even if we as moderns find some aspects of that order objectionable,” Cowen writes in his new book.

In other words, what is coming is the “new feudalism,” a phrase coined by Chapman University urban studies professor Joel Kotkin, a prolific media presence whose New Geography website is an outlet for the trend’s most vocal critics. “It’s a weird Upstairs, Downstairs world in which there’s the gentry, and the role for everybody else is to be their servants,” Kotkin said in a telephone interview. “The agenda of the gentry is to force the working class to live in apartments for the rest of their lives and be serfs. But there’s a weird cognitive dissonance. Everyone who says people ought to be living in apartments actually lives in gigantic houses or has multiple houses.”

========================================

So? Hypocrisy is hardly a new phenomenon. People really are ought to be living in apartments, even if it is suggested as part of some supposed agenda. I really don't understand all the anxiety that pops up on HN every once in a while with regard to some imaginary utopia that is decades away if it will ever come at all - Inequality is entirely secondary to the Median, the article describes a high quality of life all around with the upper echelons of society a sort of step-function above "everybody else". That's supposed to be horrible?

What about the inequality between the US and the rest of the world? I guess hypocrisy is not exclusive to any one tax bracket either.

> Yes! Let them eat beans!

Preferably in their apartments.

No, seriously now. I've got a friend who 5 years ago decided that he needs "to straighten his life out", and now he has a huge house in SV and is lead engineer at Apple. That's really fine, and obviously not everyone can have such a life. And people will really have to look inside themselves, and ask themselves what it REALLY is they want. If they want status and big houses, then they better be extraordinary smart & disciplined and/or rich. Me, I just want an office where I can do my thing, not being responsible to anyone else but myself.

A solution to this dystopian future would be the basic income as proposed in Switzerland. This is the only way in my opinion to make sure that a master/slave relationship will not exist, and people are really paid what the job is worth, unpressured by the need to survive.

It's both: property prices have bubbled up to the point where many real buyers are investors looking to rent the houses out rather than residential owners.