America's Greediest Cities

<exile> · Dec 4, 2007

Usually this type of article wouldn't be thread worthy, and this one barely crosses that line, but one part caught my attention when skimming it.

Greed gets a bad rap. Its most famous defenders--including corporate raider Ivan Boesky and his fictional counterpart Gordon Gekko--have a tendency to go to jail. St. Thomas Aquinas called greed "a sin against God." And social theorist Erich Fromm called it "a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."

But if we take greed at its most basic definition--a desire for material wealth that goes beyond the norm--then we have to face the fact that we need the greedy. They may pursue money for their own selfish reasons, becoming widget moguls or gum billionaires, but in the process they create millions of jobs. As arts patrons, their wealth makes it possible for ballerinas and sculptors to ply their crafts, and as patrons of the good life, they keep chefs and masseurs in business.
Not to mention the money they simply give away. In 2006 investor Warren Buffett pledged more than $30 billion to four foundations--and, in total, U.S. charitable giving hit $295.02 billion in 2006, a record. That's 1.7% of the gross domestic product. By contrast, Britons, who are taxed at a higher rate, gave away only 0.73% of their nation's GDP.
In Pictures: America's Greediest Cities

To come up with greediest cities, we first turned to the Forbes 400 list, our annual ranking of the richest Americans. After all, you have to want money well beyond the norm to amass the kind of fortunes they possess. (Even inheritances require careful tending.) Sure, some Forbes 400 members would claim greed wasn't their primary motivation--perhaps they wanted to change the world with a new technology, or just didn't know how to relax. Fine. We still think there's no better proxy.
We then tallied the number of Forbes 400 members from the last 10 years who live in each of the 40 largest Census-defined Metropolitan Statistical Areas. There are 751 Forbes 400 members in our 10-year tally. Of that number, 608 live in the 50 major MSAs we used to compile this list. We divided the number in each city by that city's population to come up with Forbes 400 members per capita and then ranked that list.

Some of the results are surprising. Reputed bastions of hedonism like New York and Los Angeles, for all the glamorous myths they generate, came in sixth and eighth, respectively.

Today's wealthy, it seems, are more likely to be caught in baseball hats and Birkenstocks than tux and tails. That's right-- San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, better known to the outside world as Silicon Valley, is the greediest city in America, with 1.57 members of the Forbes 400 per 100,000 residents. Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) alone, based in Santa Clara county, has generated several thousand stock-option millionaires. Rich-listers in the area include Google's Sergey Brin, with a net worth of $18.5 billion; Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) CEO Steve Jobs, with $5.7 billion; and venture capitalist Michael Moritz, with $1.3 billion.
The tech hub has created plenty of jobs, but it has also driven middle-class workers to the fringes of the real estate market. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, benefiting from the same computing boom, ranked as the second-greediest city.

Las Vegas, temple of excess, did not even make the top 10, in part because many of those doing their sinning there live elsewhere. (It ranked 11th.) Pious Seattle, on the other hand, with 0.67 rich-listers per 100,000 residents, came in third, thanks in part to three billionaires spawned by Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people )--Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer--and one, Jeff Bezos, by Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ).

Other cities on the list paint a more diverse picture of wealth. Denver, ranked fourth, counts a cheese monger among its billionaires, while Miami, ranked 10th, is home to the founder of Slim-Fast.

That ought to be a lesson to the would-be wealthy: You can get rich fattening Americans up, and get rich slimming them down. Indeed, a real master of the hedged bet would take positions in both markets. And why not? In the words of Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street, "Greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA."

http://www.forbes.com/2007/11/30/gr...life-cx_ee_1203greed.html?feed=rss_popstories
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It is good we have the greedy or we'd probably all go hungry or God-forbid we might not have had the things necessary to have a kickin' home theatre system.

Tango3 · Dec 4, 2007

Or perhaps we wouldn't have been conceived to be here in the first place to be hungry?

ghrit · Dec 4, 2007

Greed? Why is New Orleans not listed?

<exile> · Dec 4, 2007

ghrit said: ↑

Greed? Why is New Orleans not listed?
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They're entitled not greedy

ghrit · Dec 4, 2007

<exile> said: ↑

They're entitled not greedy

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</exile>

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America's Greediest Cities

<exile> Padawan Learner

Tango3 Aimless wanderer

ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

<exile> Padawan Learner

ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

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America's Greediest Cities

<exile> Padawan Learner

Tango3 Aimless wanderer

ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

<exile> Padawan Learner

ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

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