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The class of well-paid FAANG employees is not that large: I'd guessestimate that all five combined employ ~100,000 engineers in the US, give or take. Yes, they

The class of well-paid FAANG employees is not that large: I'd guessestimate that all five combined employ ~100,000 engineers in the US, give or take. Yes, they have many more employees in total, but many of these are not well-paid engineering roles and/or are not in the US. If we generously assume that there are 3x as many engineers employed at various non-FAANGs that pay competitive salaries, we still only get ~400,000 people, or around 0.1% of the population of the US. There's one, maybe two major cities in the US where this has visibly impacted the entire local market: SF and Seattle. Everywhere else tech employment is more or less a rounding error. Just to confirm I'm not pulling these figures entirely out of my ass, Pew Research says the "upper-income tier" has grown from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021 (+7%), but the "middle class" (median income $90k in 2021 dollars) has shrunk from 61% in 1971 to 50% (-11%) in 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a...

hansvm 1y ago
It's also visible in Austin, your broader point notwithstanding.
alwa 1y ago
So the [middle + upper] tier has shifted from 75% to 71%, for a 4% net drift downward? While 7% have drifted upward from [middle + lower] classes to upper? The Pew link is fascinating me, thank you for sharing it! One thing that stands out to me is just how extreme the upper-class skew is—its median being 10x the median lower-class income. That helps me contextualize the types of graph that describe the “decline of the middle class” as a share of total wealth: it makes it seem more like a story of “lots of middle-class families’ wealth is wealthy in global terms and also growing, but a shocking number of families have shockingly much money too.” To some degree a story of middle class decline relative to the people richer than them—but to an even greater degree, a story of a burgeoning upper class. Certainly you’re right that highly-paid tech workers are a drop in that bucket. To me, though, the overall numbers frustrate the “decline of the middle class” narrative to some extent. I guess it’s considerably worse to sink from prosperous classes to lower-class than it is to rise from the middle to the upper class—still, the net slice of the population affected by the change is smaller than I would have guessed.
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hansvm 1y ago

It's also visible in Austin, your broader point notwithstanding.

alwa 1y ago

So the [middle + upper] tier has shifted from 75% to 71%, for a 4% net drift downward? While 7% have drifted upward from [middle + lower] classes to upper? The Pew link is fascinating me, thank you for sharing it! One thing that stands out to me is just how extreme the upper-class skew is—its median being 10x the median lower-class income. That helps me contextualize the types of graph that describe the “decline of the middle class” as a share of total wealth: it makes it seem more like a story of “lots of middle-class families’ wealth is wealthy in global terms and also growing, but a shocking number of families have shockingly much money too.” To some degree a story of middle class decline relative to the people richer than them—but to an even greater degree, a story of a burgeoning upper class. Certainly you’re right that highly-paid tech workers are a drop in that bucket. To me, though, the overall numbers frustrate the “decline of the middle class” narrative to some extent. I guess it’s considerably worse to sink from prosperous classes to lower-class than it is to rise from the middle to the upper class—still, the net slice of the population affected by the change is smaller than I would have guessed.

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