Overcoming the shaky moral compass of Silicon Valley

When I lived in Silicon Valley, I was struck by the region’s income disparity and by the lack of compassion wealthy tech workers sometimes displayed toward the poor.

I would overhear people complain about the homeless in degrading ways. Sometimes their disgust spread online. One notorious example took place in 2013, when Greg Gopman, then chief executive of code startup AngelHack, lamented on Facebook: "Why the heart of our city has to be overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash I have no clue." (He later deleted the post.)

This is not exactly in keeping with the valley’s self-designated catchphrase: “We’re making the world a better place.”

Homelessness is everywhere in Silicon Valley. Consider the Jungle, an encampment in San Jose, where 350 homeless people lived in tents and shacks. The Jungle sat like the backdrop for a dystopian sci-fi novel in the shadow of Apple, Google and other tech giants until it was shut down last year after pressure from neighbours and water-quality regulators.

The wayward moral compass of the valley also manifests itself in the bizarrely frivolous things some tech execs pursue: an Uber for private jets, a social network for the 1 per cent and a dating app only for rich men.

Every city has its homeless problems, but Silicon Valley is supposed to be different, making the world a better . . . you get the point.

Paul K Piff, a professor of psychology and social behaviour at the University of California, Irvine, believes all the money sloshing around the valley could make some tech executives unaware of their surroundings. He has conducted several social experiments that consistently show that when people gain access to money, their empathy toward the less fortunate falls and, at the same time, their sense of entitlement and self-interest rises.

“With money comes a decreased level of compassion towards other people and an increased focus on yourself,” Piff says. “It isn’t that it is making people bad. It just makes them more internally focused.”

Mean tendencies

In one study, Piff rigged a two-person game of

Monopoly

to ensure that one participant had the upper hand. Before long, the person winning began displaying mean tendencies toward the loser. In another study, Piff found that poor people gave away more money to people in need than the rich do.

Other researchers have found that just thinking about money can have a similar effect. Kathleen Vohs, a professor of marketing in the University of Minnesota, conducted an experiment in which two groups sat in front of a computer screen saver. One group saw fish swim by, the other saw money.

“The group that sees the money will be self-concerned, they’ll use the word ‘I’ and ‘me’ more, and they are really worried about what they’ll get out of the situation,” Vohs says. “They are also not very good interpersonally; they are not helpful, not kind, not empathetic.”

While these experiments are mostly lab-based and can be applied to anyone with money, they illustrate the way many tech workers live and why some may be oblivious to the plight of those around them.

Silicon Valley has been called the greatest creation of wealth in history. A report last year found that the average tech worker’s pay in San Mateo County, home to East Palo Alto and Menlo Park, is $291,497 a year. Even the interns in tech are rich, with some making $75,000 a year.

Moreover, those who are not superrich often live as if they are. Employees at large tech companies commute in free first-class buses and work on campuses filled with numerous perks like free sushi, massages and yoga classes.

This is not to say that everybody in Silicon Valley lacks compassion. There are plenty of tech workers who volunteer. Gopman, who once compared the homeless to “trash,” has become an advocate for people in need and recently started a nonprofit to tackle San Francisco’s homeless crisis.

Big-name tech executives are also involved. Ron Conway, a highly influential investor, has focused some of his philanthropy on homelessness. Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, has been very vocal about getting fellow techies to adopt a "pay as you go" model for charitable giving, rather than a "pay at the end" model, after retirement. (He has given away well over $150 million.)

Giving back

“There is now a huge hunger and desire on the part of employees at many of the startups I work with to want to do something – to try and give back – but there is a lack of understanding about what is it they can do,” said

James Higa

, a former Apple executive and now executive director at

Philanthropic Ventures Foundation

.

He says that thinking about how to give back and solving intractable problems like homelessness can be a lot more difficult than coming up with a good idea for a startup. Especially a startup that is "making the world a better place". – (New York Times News Service 2015)