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Comment by LittleTimothy | Hacker News Reader

I think about this quite often. What I'd really like to study at some point is: How much more does the receptionist at JP Morgan's head quarters make than the receptionist at Walmart's headquarters?

Because fundamentally I think there is an effect where the people in proximity to lots of money earn more. Obviously the Walmart receptionist and the JP Morgan receptionist are doing basically the same job. But the JP Morgan receptionist is surrounded by people who wouldn't think twice about doubling the receptionists pay and I would imagine that has a significant effect.

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Experienced this(or actually, a similar phenomenon) myself during the brief, beautiful moment in my life when I was working in Switzerland and was making as much as the locals, while hailing from a country with approximately 20% the GDP per capita, if not less.

Crazy how the same box of pasta is suddenly three times the price once you cross the border.

It's not the proximity to money, it's the real estate tied to doing that job.

If you want to be the receptionist at Goldman Sachs at their headquarters at 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, then you're looking at paying $616,250 for a 556 sq. ft. studio apartment. And that's just the housing. If you want to live within 30 minutes of work, you can get that number down to $400,000, but that's also a studio apartment.

Then you have to consider some place to eat - or you bring your own meals.

What about clothing? You need clothing that looks the part.

It's the proximity to real estate, which I guess you could argue is a proximity to "lots of money" as you put it, but... not reeeaaaally...

Sure, but real estate is expensive in those places for a reason - it being typically because a sufficient number of people with lots of money want to buy it.

There is only a weak correlation between local income and housing costs, and most of that is that it's hard to get extreme housing prices in areas with low income, rather than that housing in high income areas is inherently required to be expensive.

For example, Boston has a higher per-capita income than NYC but somewhat lower housing costs, and Austin has around the same per-capita income as Los Angeles but significantly lower housing costs. Because it's a lot easier to build housing in Texas than in California.

JP Morgan is also in NYC and Wal Mart is in Arkansas.

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