Technology and Inequality
By David Rotman,
MIT Technology Review
| 10. 21. 2014
The signs of the gap—really, a chasm—between the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss in Silicon Valley. On a bustling morning in downtown Palo Alto, the center of today’s technology boom, apparently homeless people and their meager belongings occupy almost every available public bench. Twenty minutes away in San Jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungle—reputed to be the largest in the country—has taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe’s headquarters and the gleaming, ultramodern city hall.
The homeless are the most visible signs of poverty in the region. But the numbers back up first impressions. Median income in Silicon Valley reached $94,000 in 2013, far above the national median of around $53,000. Yet an estimated 31 percent of jobs pay $16 per hour or less, below what is needed to support a family in an area with notoriously expensive housing. The poverty rate in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, is around 19 percent, according to calculations that factor in the high cost...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Shoumita Dasgupta, STAT | 10.03.2025
President Trump and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have characterized the rise in autism diagnoses in recent years as an epidemic requiring emergency intervention.
This approach is factually wrong: The broadening definition of autism and the improvement in diagnosis...
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
By Émile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025
The Internet philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky has been predicting the end of the world for decades. In 1996, he confidently declared that the singularity — the moment at which computers become more “intelligent” than humanity — would happen in 2021, though...