Yeah, that thought pattern does explain much of the dysfunction in american government
The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy
million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a
cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if
someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal,
whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow
to put on it. - Davis X. Machina, balloon-juice.com
that perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the 90s on...
What I'm trying to say is... I'd be more interested in getting a bigger chunk of society to catch up to our level than us complaining, getting more and widening the gap between us and the rest of middle class USA. Basically, I think bayarea tech folks are doing pretty good and the ones who are truly suffering are the ones not in tech. The imagery[1] in my mind is like those 3-legged races where 2 people tie one of their legs to each other... the bayarea-tech guy is in full speed mode and the other person is being dragged on the floor, taking all kinds of scratches. Can we at least give everyone else a chance to catch their breath before we talk about dashing ahead even further than we already are? And we definitely are ahead.
As Peter Thiel has observed, if we tried to bring the world up to an American middle class standard of living without changing anything else, we'd quickly destroy the planet. So your choices are a: leave everyone else poor (a.1: wait til the oil runs out so we're poor too), or b: find some way to get us off oil and other things that keep us from raising that standard of living globally.
Silicon Valley, at its best, is doing exactly that. And sure as hell isn't anyone else trying.
The "kill my neighbor's cow so everything is even" is an even more toxic thought pattern than the Prisoner's Dilemma that constitutes our mainstream.
Think big, man.