Who are we to complain? Location-based pay is 80% political because immigration law keeps the majority of the world's people from immigrating to countries with

Who are we to complain? Location-based pay is 80% political because immigration law keeps the majority of the world's people from immigrating to countries with better human rights laws than their own. The U.S. fought a civil war over the biggest human rights abuse (slavery) so I'd say it's worth complaining about. Disparity of human rights is arbitraged by national governments in free trade (ever wonder why free trade and not free movement?) agreements to allow profit at the national levels on both sides. That explains $10 T-shirts. The reason that SV in particular currently has insane income disparity is because online advertising is a very inefficient market and FB and Google can still afford to set arbitrary de-facto salaries for tech workers. There is a mix of other market disruption and speculative investing that helps to keep the whole thing afloat. The trend in a healthy market should be for tech salaries to normalize with the rest of the world.