A side effect of this is that if your individual productivity goes up, your real wage might go up, but if your whole industry’s productivity goes up, it’ll be mitigated by this effect.
Kinda like how everything in SF is so expensive, so the real wage is diminished by the increasing cost of living.
SF is an aberration because relocated high-income earners and rich people move in and raise prices because they out-compete for limited resources by throwing money around (out-bidding real estate) and/or sellers raising prices knowing the upper-crust will still pay them.
SF also is a problem for anyone not making more than $150k/year because it's a magical wonderland where everyone wants to live there, and so they're willing to irrationally sacrifice their financial futures to hang-on to something they can't afford, i.e., paying 50%+ income in rent, unable to contribute 10% to savings, and other forms of financial suicide.
How lower income people make it in SF, even with rent controls, seems like an unsustainable proposition.
I think a better way of measuring of microeconomic affordability is a reasonable budgeted cost-of-living for one person per month in a median housing situation in relation to their potential income. In other words, or thought of another way, the ratio of cost-of-living to income in local nominal dollars.
This is not mutually exclusive though. When the incumbents are poor to start with, it does help them from not being gentrified out of their homes.
Between scenario A: rent control, some poor people are helped, others are not and scenario B: all poor people are forced out of the neighborhood, A starts to look acceptable.
Until that is, someone comes up with a workable scenario C that helps even more people than A. (UBI looks great in theory, but I think the "workable" part needs some more work.)
A side effect of this is that if your individual productivity goes up, your real wage might go up, but if your whole industry’s productivity goes up, it’ll be mitigated by this effect.
Articles telling us to focus on team, rather than individual, productivity should probably be viewed through this lens.
Kinda like how everything in SF is so expensive, so the real wage is diminished by the increasing cost of living.