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Have you ever been to billionaire’s row in San Francisco? It’s an exceptionally rich part of San Francisco filled with enormous tech wealth, the kind of place where you can make a living out of digging through the trash of the rich.

Sitting on top of Silicon Valley, San Francisco has the highest density of billionaires in the world, according to a new
“Billionaire Census” report from Wealth-X.

San Francisco has a total tally of 75 billionaires. That means one out of every 11,600 people in the city by the bay is a billionaire, a number that dwarfs the next cities on the list:
New York, Dubai, and Hong Kong.

Just because someone has a tech job in Silicon Valley, it doesn’t mean they are pulling in a high salary with loads of paid time off, piles of free food and private buses to shuttle them to and from work. Contract workers often don’t share in these perks, even if they’re doing white-collar jobs like developing software, analyzing data or running the servers these tech companies depend on.

People give massive amounts of their personal data to companies for free every day. Some economists, academics and activists think they should be paid for their contributions. Called data dividends, or sometimes digital or technology dividends, the somewhat obscure idea got a boost on Tuesday from an unexpected source: California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom. “California’s consumers should … be able to share in the wealth that is created from their data. And so I’ve asked my team to develop a proposal for a new data dividend for Californians, because we recognize that your data has value and it belongs to you,” said Newsom during his annual State of the State speech.

People give massive amounts of their personal data to companies for free every day. Some economists, academics and activists think they should be paid for their contributions.

Called data dividends, or sometimes digital or technology dividends, the somewhat obscure idea got a boost on Tuesday from an unexpected source: Gavin Newsom.

“California’s consumers should … be able to share in the wealth that is created from their data. And so I’ve asked my team to develop a proposal for a new data dividend for Californians, because we recognize that your data has value and it belongs to you,” said Newsom during his annual State of the State speech.

The concept is based in part on an existing model in Alaska where residents receive payment for their share of the state’s oil-royalties fund dividend each fall. The payouts, which can vary from hundreds of dollars to a couple thousand of dollars per person, have become a regular part of the state’s economy.

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As widely reported, before John Dingell, the longest serving member of the U.S. Congress, passed away recently, he shared some thoughts in his final statement to America.  One of those missives was the following:
My personal and political character was formed in a different era that was kinder, if not necessarily gentler. We observed modicums of respect even as we fought, often bitterly and savagely, over issues that were literally life and death….” The same idea of mutual respect during intense debate was described by Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor in their 2015 book, Equity, Growth and Community: What the Nation Can Learn from America’s Metro Areas, as “principled conflict.”

In using that term, Benner and Pastor were not referring to the idea of conflicts over principles, but rather to the principles of conflict: that struggles should be waged with integrity and that it is possible to directly address real conflicts in goals, objectives and values in a way that also recognizes the need to sustain long-term relationships.

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Silicon Valley has been an engine for economic growth in the last few decades, but that wealth is not being shared with most of the workers in the industry. Nine in 10 workers in Silicon Valley make less now than they did in 1997 after adjusting for inflation, according to a new report from the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Middle-class workers are being hit the hardest, with their earnings down by 14 percent after inflation. For those at the lowest rung of the income ladder, incomes have gone down less, dropping just 1 percent. This may be because minimum-wage hikes are having some impact, suggests Chris Benner, Ph.D., director and chair of the Institute for Social Transformation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who published the study, along with worker advocacy group Working Partnerships USA.

The report showed that wages are stagnant despite economic growth and overall wage growth. Overall per capital economic output increased by 74 percent between 2001 and 2017 in inflation-adjusted terms. Overall wages increased, too. Wages rose 3.1 percent in the last quarter, the highest increase in a decade, according to the Labor Department.

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As the gig economy grows, the ratio of contract workers to regular employees in corporate America is shifting. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber and other Silicon Valley tech titans now employ thousands of contract workers to do a host of functions — anything from sales and writing code to managing teams and testing products. This year at Google, contract workers outnumbered direct employees for the first time in the company’s 20-year history.

It’s not only in Silicon Valley. The trend is on the rise as public companies look for ways to trim HR costs or hire in-demand skills in a tight labor market. The U.S. jobless rate dropped to 3.7 percent in September, the lowest since 1969, down from 3.9 percent in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Some 57.3 million Americans, or 36 percent of the workforce, are now freelancing, according to a 2017 report by Upwork. In San Mateo and Santa Clara counties alone, there are an estimated 39,000 workers who are contracted to tech companies, according to one estimate by University of California Santa Cruz researchers.

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