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Comment by alphagrep12345 | Hacker News Reader

People complain that prices are so high that none of the restaurant staff, waiters, etc can live in the city. NY is also as costly as SF. You see foodcarts which earn lesser than SF restaurants, right in the Financial District. How does NY manage this? People live somewhere away and commute. It's going to get difficult for workers, but we're definitely not in any kind of crisis here. NY has been managing it since ages. Several other cities are. SF too can.

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NY has a robust public transportation system. SF does not. Commuting via car, parking, etc creates a floor on who can participate in SF’s economy.

I live in New York now and completely agree. That’s not to say my criticisms of the Bay don’t also apply to NYC.

> NY is also as costly as SF

Actually, it’s cheaper. Our NIMBYs aren’t so supercharged so as to have convinced most renters that construction is bad for them.

> [service workers] live somewhere away and commute.

How is that acceptable morally? Americans believe they have a meritocracy and look down their noses at societies like India with caste systems, but in reality America has a caste system too, even if somewhat better.

> How is that acceptable morally?

How is commuting morally acceptable?

> Americans believe they have a meritocracy

That’s an unwarranted generality. In my experience, the likelihood of an American claiming to believe that is positively correlated with socioeconomic status: those with higher status are more likely to believe status reflects merit.

Agree somewhat. Just like many Muslim women have bought into the misogyny inherent in having to wear a burqa, many people on the bottom in America have bought into the meritocracy and American Dream myths.

> Just like many Muslim women have bought into the misogyny inherent in having to wear a burqa

I'm disinclined to view one set of sex-specific cultural standards of modesty as inherently sexist unless one views all of them that way.

For the most part I do. Americans disparage Muslim practices like this as backward, yet women here get arrested for breastfeeding in public. American puritanical attitudes differ from Muslim attitudes by degree, not kind. I’m generalizing of course. I’m talking about cultures, not every individual.

Your arguments might be more compelling if you'd stick to one domain within a discussion, or at the very least, non-distractingly coherent ones. Your first comment was germane. This less so.

I was replying to

> those with higher status are more likely to believe status reflects merit.

It correlates much less than one would think, much as being anti-burqa doesn’t correlate with gender within a Muslim population as much as we’d think.

Fair enough, though that wasn't clearly communicated.

Having to commute because the real estate market prices you out is the same as a caste system?

Yes, because one class of people, determined predominantly by birth (race, gender, genetic advantages at skills in short supply), get to choose where they live, and are served by another class of people who have to live far away and spend their already discounted time commuting, who can’t afford the very thing they work to provide the upper castes.

Not caste advantages but earned? That’s like saying a 7 foot tall athletically gifted person earned the wealth those innate attributes gave him in an NBA career.

There’s certainly a perspective where everyone’s equal and nobody deserves anything. The 7 foot basketball player would play worse if he wasn’t born tall; the Stanford valedictorian would score less if she wasn’t born smart.

That doesn’t seem like a productive way to look at this kind of inequality issue. If some places to live are better than others, not everyone can have the best.

But isn't the caste system marked by lack of mobility, in terms of the ability to transcend your caste?

That’s why I said “somewhat better“. But ask 100 black persons how much mobility they have, and see how many say “I have completed mobility, race doesn’t matter. White supremacy is a myth.” Or the brown people who wash your restaurant dishes, mow yours SV lawns and clean your SV office toilets. Sure, many are immigrants who come here because they have more opportunities than where they came from, but that’s moving up a rung in the caste system, not escaping it. Even the liberal essays I read advocating more immigration or amnesty say things like “Who else will pick our fruit?”. I cringe and am ashamed for us every time I read something like that.

Even in India in theory you have mobility, as the country has tried to address it the same way America has tied to correct a history of racism: caste-based discrimination is illegal, and there is affirmative action / quotas to correct imbalances. But just as here, where 150 years after the Civil War and 50 years after MLK we have a racially stratified society, so the problem persists in India.

There was a time that neighbourhoods were far more socioeconomically integrated, though the poor tended to live either above or below (basement apartments) the wealthy.

(Hight gained status with the introduction of lifts.)

Though on balance those times were far less class-blind, or soceoeconomically mobile, thanmuch of the20h-21st centuries.

Win some, lose some.

> How is that acceptable morally?

Because Economics

Once, when Boris Yeltsin was asked why he cannot make it so that everyone has everything, he replied very wisely: "there is not enough 'everything' for everyone"

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