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Notes -
As far as your second point, I think just going off the salaries to determine who is better off is probably not all that good. Having your entire society be a nice, high trust place to live where you can safely walk around at all hours and you have good, safe, and efficient public transportation would seem to make up for a smaller apartment and no car. Having more money but tripping over homeless people and seeing trash everywhere doesn’t seem a good trade to me.
And yet by revealed preference, people want to live in San Francisco. Anyway, entire societies that are nice, high trust places to live where you can safely walk around at all hours and have good, safe, efficient public transportation but are poor... well, they're the stuff of fantasy, I suspect.
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