That's not quite right: you only get your whole surplus extracted as rent in a market with artificial restrictions on housing. Unfortunately for us programmers

That's not quite right: you only get your whole surplus extracted as rent in a market with artificial restrictions on housing. Unfortunately for us programmers our top job market happens to be an awful housing market, but that seems to be an accident of history -- we could've ended up somewhere else with rents that are high but not ridiculous. That's how Bay Area rents seemed to me 15 years ago.