The interesting thing is that items with nation wide prices (like cars) are more "expensive" in low cost of living areas, because they are worth a higher fraction of the median salary.

What really drives bay area prices are the real estate prices, which then impacts labor pricing.

That is a good point that many people ignore. Living costs are much more in wealthier areas, however consumer goods generally stay the same price regardless of area and don't scale with relative pay of the area. So unless your housing expenses scales faster than the pay increase scales from working in those wealthier areas, you have far more luxury and consumer spending available to you by living in that wealthier area. Not to mention the many other benefits of living in a more "expensive" area like having greater availability, competition, and choices for consumer services, or economic opportunities and luxury services.

Obviously this would still have to be evaluated on a place-to-place and person-to-person basis, but I think more often than not living in a wealthier area increases your quality of living; but we also can't expect our entire nation of people to move around like a bunch of migrant workers all the time. I think we should worry about how this ends up economically punishing people who didn't predict the next 25+ years of economic changes when they try to find somewhere to settle down and build a business or buy a home and have a family.

Moving from Dallas to San Francisco, the prices at Trader Joe's and CVS, Mc Donald's and other nationwide chains were the same. Eating out and entertainment seem roughly 50% more expensive here (service and food quality has decreased, oddly though). All of the cost of living calculators seem to assume that day to day costs scale roughly linearly with housing, but that hasn't been my experience at all.

  Mc Donald's

So in other areas of the country, the McDouble went from $1 to over $2 in less than a year?

I don't think that's the point. The point is that the required income in SV is an order of magnitude larger than what is required in most of the country to do those same things.

Isn't that the same thing as what OP said? Why shouldn't "living in SV" be considered a "luxury?"

You know where you don't need millions to do all of that? Literally most of the country.

If someone was complaining to me about being unable to live in, say, Beverly Hills, I'd say the same thing: there's nothing stopping you from moving to any other state and living quite comfortably - in fact, probably having a much _better_ standard of living.

Beverly Hills has a population of 35,000. It's a neighborhood. Silicon Valley has a population of a few million (depending on how you define it). A luxury city is more absurd than a luxury neighborhood because a city requires people who don't receive luxury salaries to function.

> a city requires people who don't receive luxury salaries to function.

That is such a key, and overlooked, point. People are so busy imagining themselves in the shoes of one of the luxuriating few that they forget about the entire human ecosystem required to make a city function.

I interpreted OP to be referencing things like school, home, car, etc as luxury goods, not living in SV. I do obviously agree with the rest of your comment though.

They make a lot of money, but they spend a lot of money. Also, they have to be able to feed their families, to paraphrase a couple of former NBA players.

Only in the US things like giving your kids proper education and saving for nice retirement are considered luxury goods. In Europe they are treated almost as human rights :)

Proper education and attendance at an institution that shows you can compete and/or belong with the top x% are different things. The latter is what the article is referring to.

No, it's not. Why is "being able to compete and/or belong with the top x%" in any way dependent on money? Europe has world-class universities which are essentially free. You get into them by proving qualification, not wealth.

The original quote was attendance at a "top" school, not just a decent one.

> You get into them by proving qualification, not wealth.

I think the context indicates that we're talking about kids who couldn't get in by proving qualification, so their only way in is wealth. You want your kids to attend Harvard, not because they're smart enough but because you can pay full price tuition? Well, it's going to cost rather a lot.

> The original quote was attendance at a "top" school, not just a decent one.

I realize that.

> You want your kids to attend Harvard, not because they're smart enough but because you can pay full price tuition? Well, it's going to cost rather a lot.

Why is that even an option? The point was that there is no tuition in Europe (at least in the countries I know). If your kid is unqualified, it is unqualified, you don't get to override that just because you have money.

Why is that even an option? Because Harvard likes money. (And Harvard is a private institution, not run by the government.)

I don't think this is necessarily about the poor state of public education. Two of the top three school districts are in the bay area, and 9 are in the top 20. https://blog.pacificunion.com/silicon-valley-again-earns-hig... I'd expect that an engineer could find a decent public school for their kids ignoring any special circumstances.

I think it's more to do with the cost of private education. I found a couple of private middle schools that charged between $30k and $35k per student per year.

The top SF Bay Area school districts are all in areas with high housing prices (big part of the reason why the housing prices are high to begin with).

Unlike other parts of the US, there are few or no "magnet" schools in lower-income areas. Public school assignments are solely based on your residential address.

So in an indirect sense, sending your kids to a good public school is still costly. In some cases, even sending your kids to a top private school while living in a cheaper area may save money in the end.

  Public school assignments are solely based on your residential address.

I don't think that's true at all for SF.

Let's talk about that state provided retirement money in 10 years again...