The other guy doesn't just get shiny objects, they also get influence and power over other people, along with freedom to do (mostly) what they want.
One very relevant example: you can move to the US and get a green card as an investor, if you invest a six figure amount. This is also true for other Western countries. Money buys you freedom to not work, freedom to live wherever you want, and sometimes it can even buy you laws (or avoidance of existing laws).
Yep. All(most) rich people have lots of power and freedom. Does THAT make them happy? Because all of the data indicates that wealth (and all of its accompanying benefits) do NOT.
Note that $ does correlate with happiness on the low end of the scale. i.e. being very poor correlates with unhappiness. But beyond about $75k/yr, no correlation.
Since wealth won't make the rich happier, but poverty seems to make the poor suffer in very concrete ways (like lacking medical insurance), it would make sense for the poor to be paid better, and the wealthy to have smaller paychecks.
It wouldn't actually help. The reason poverty makes the poor suffer is that they struggle to afford basic necessities of life. The price of those necessities is set by how much money the average person has available to spend on them. If you give everyone more money, then the price of food/rent/medicine will just rise accordingly.
Just look at what's happening with Bay Area rents. Larry and Sergey having a few billion doesn't materially impact them. Google expanding from 20,000 => 35,000 employees and paying all of them $150K+ does. Now there's someone else who makes just as much as you who's willing to pay a premium for that apartment.
The way to drive down the cost of basic necessities is through massive improvements in productivity that suddenly make the supply of a good large enough for everyone to have one. Think of Ford and the automobile, or GE and household appliances, or Apple/Dell/Microsoft/Intel and computers, or the green revolution and food.
The poor by definition make less than average - and right now they make a lot less than average. A median income earner at around 50k per year makes over three times what a minimum wage worker earning around 15k per year makes.
These folks are going to qualify for Medicaid in 2014. They can't participate in the market-based healthcare system. They're just too poor. Give them more money, and they'll be able to participate in a market-based system.
That's at odds with your argument about high tech gentrification in the Bay Area. Those workers were going to start out at the median income, and only earn more over time. So the effect of their getting more money is going to raise prices.
My argument is that the janitors at Google (and other companies owned by the wealthy) should get paid more. My argument is that that housekeeper hired by Meg Whitman should have been paid more, and paid overtime etc.
That applies to food, hopefully medicine in a few decades, but not to rent. Until we adopt some sort of land/wealth tax, or make land/house management public and available to everyone, land is going to be scarse and sold at a premium.
One very relevant example: you can move to the US and get a green card as an investor, if you invest a six figure amount. This is also true for other Western countries. Money buys you freedom to not work, freedom to live wherever you want, and sometimes it can even buy you laws (or avoidance of existing laws).