The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker(nooneshappy.com) |
The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker(nooneshappy.com) |
I wish I knew the answer to this question: What shape would organized resistance have in this day and age, especially with the fragmentation of reality caused by social media?
Myself and almost everyone in my social circles under the age of 50 seem well-primed to participate in such organized resistance, were it to come to life.
(Socialism support is ~62% of the under 30 cohort, and 2M voters 55+ age out every year, progress is a function of time and electorate turnover, with progress visible via observing outcomes at election milestones)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529387 (citations)
As someone who was hired into manufacturing just before the jobs collapse detailed here, I have vivid memories of the way things were. Being employed felt valuable. Acquiring skill felt respected and rewarded. Then, still young, I myself contributed to the shift of this work out of the country, helping develop software that supported exchanging files with India and helping train Chinese management on our workflows.
I feel privileged to be one of the few of my generation who experienced first hand what a previous generation took for granted. But I feel like a Cassandra sometimes trying to tell peers, Yes, the work situation in America really could be so much better.
Pretty much every generation has some things like that. Remember the convenience of domestic air travel in the '90s? You didn't need a boarding pass to meet someone at the gate. (Some airports are relaxing this.)
I bet the explanation for this is that non-discretionary costs got higher, so people pulled back on discretionary spending. I do wonder if maybe people intentionally pulled back on discretionary spending despite small wage growth over time and capture was performed by housing, healthcare, and childcare. Or incentives by the government caused it. I have no clue.
Today, that family plan, even as a HMO, can easily be $3000/month. I would guess that mythical apartment is maybe $1200/month now.
So what happened Health Care? how has the caregiver:administrator ratio changed in the past 30+ years? You've performed about 3x worse than Real Estate in terms of value, yet you're not quite as visible and complained-about because you hide behind employment. Hmmm.
And of course the evergreen Housing Theory of Everything https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Basically real estate is the thirsty sponge that soaks up all the gains.
> Owning a home is the primary mechanism through which ordinary people build wealth.
That alone is a direct answer. Their wealth building is your failure. Their successful investments priced you out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
Figure out how to make more money, or how to be happy with less, or go live somewhere else. (I’ve done all three, at various points.) Writing AI-assisted screeds on how broken the system is doesn’t bring us closer to a functioning system, and it sure as hell doesn’t help you live a happy life.
I do hope that America manages to solve these problems. But I wouldn’t bet my life on it.
Why would the only solution be "figure out how to make more money"? There are many professions where it isn't even possible to figure that out, should all of them just shut up and move? It's great you were able to go live somewhere else, for some it would be devastating to lose their sense of belonging, other people have different priorities for what they consider a happy life.
Sorry but I think it's even less conducive to anything to tell people to shut up, it's an easy cop out, a way to invert the blame while being thoroughly unhelpful.
This seems like the core claim, and I don't think it's true? The author references Gallup data on a metric they call "employee engagement", referencing the fact that it's fallen to 31% in the US, but the underlying report (https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-...) says that that this is the best in the world and the European countries the author is using as a point of comparison have the worst in the world. The idea that people in the US are particularly demoralized as workers, while countries with a strong safety net leave everyone satisfied and loving their bosses, is not consistent with any data I've seen.
(Of course, employee psychology is far from the most important reason why we might want to build a better safety net.)
Another thing I’ve noticed is Americans are extremely non-self-aware about this topic. Go ask your favorite frontier LLM to tell you about notable moments in American history when they rejected socialism, explicitly or otherwise. Overall in history, and over just the last 30 years specifically. Institutions, and the electorate itself.
My cousin makes around 60k/year. He had lower paying jobs before this. He now owns a home in a good area and doesn't live paycheck-to-paycheck.
He saved money for years, invested part of it, and was able to pay a large down payment on his house. His monthly expenses are low and he doesn't buy the latest or greatest.
Too many people spend money on booze, drugs, expensive hobbies, and traveling. They then wonder why they can't ever buy a house and have no money left over at the end of the month.
Run the numbers, and no, you really can't. Because if you have a health crisis you'll still be bankrupt.
You need an absolute minimum of $100k to protect yourself from health bankruptcy, and if you have a serious condition that's going to be too small by one or two orders of magnitude.
You're not going to get that from a $60k job.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-census-projections-sh...
With socialized medicine, the state has some very constructive incentives. People who get sick and stay sick don't produce as much taxable income, so keeping citizens healthy is good. It costs more to remedy conditions after they develop than it does to prevent them, so preventative care is offered and even pushed. The government is on the hook for unemployed and retired people, so it makes sense for healthcare to take a long-term approach.
In the U.S. system, insurance companies want to collect money and then not be responsible for you once you become too expensive. If you get sick and can't work, lose your company plan, or can no longer afford your personal plan, that's great! You're no longer their problem. Preventative care? Sounds like a short-term expense for no long-term payoff. So old that you're virtually guaranteed to need care? Good luck getting insured without paying a fortune out of pocket! The affordable care act was pretty insane in that it left insurance companies in the loop and simply shovelled money into a broken machine. It was better than nothing, but its design made it clear that U.S. insurance companies had accomplished complete regulatory capture.
The 1% in the U.S. might get better care than they would in a country with socialized medicine (depending on the country), but the average white collar worker does not, and there's also less security. If you lose your job because of AI or because some exec made bad decisions for your company and then get a serious condition at just the wrong moment, you're F'd. How can typical Americans have peace of mind?
In usa, almost all of healthcare spending is on chronic diseases of ppl who are on disablity and really old.
> How can typical Americans have peace of mind?
I've done the following
1. go on spouse insurance . both ppl must work in usa.
2. dip into your savings and enroll in obamacare
3. run out of savings and fall into medicare eligiblity
> The 1% in the U.S. might get better care than they would in a country with socialized medicine (depending on the country), but the average white collar worker does not
This is not correct. When i was on cheap obamacare i had to go to some horrible hospital in south chiacago and got horrible care. They didnt even give me bed to recover from surgery i was throwing up from nausea in the outpatient room.
I get to go to northwestern and treated like a king in a posh hospital on my employer insurance.
My wife had both of our kids on this plan and my deductible was $3,000.
"So what happened Health Care"
Health insurance stopped being insurance when the government forced them to cover everything. You are paying for risks that will never apply to you.
So I guess if you have a serious condition its post tax $40k/year until bankruptcy or death. How are you supposed to earn an extra 40k if youre not healthy enough to work. This is actually an insane system!
The pooling of risks is literally what makes it insurance. If any part of health insurance is arguably not actually insurance it's the annual preventative care that is certain to apply to you.
There was no out of pocket maximum, you were denied for pre existing health conditions, and a surprise bill could show up anytime.
Now, you can buy health insurance even if you know your anemic kid will need $1.5M of treatment in the year, and it will only cost you ~$10k to ~$15k per year.
To be clear, today’s health insurance premiums are not premiums either, they are taxes, due to the legal ban on underwriting health risks and caps on premium price ratios between various ages. For example, my kid is going to use up more healthcare than he will probably ever earn in his life, before he even turns 7. Your premiums are what is paying for that, aka wealth redistribution via “premiums”.
The number of paper pushers and executives is sustained by your premium.
Unions trample human rights and they don't increase wages long-term, rather they increase deadweight-loss and limit opportunities. I would not work for an employer with a mandatory union and I strongly recommend nobody work for one either.
Like which one more frequently monitors your time in the bathroom?
> Hanania was a contributor to Project 2025 regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. His advocacy against DEI has been influential among Republican and conservative policy-makers in the United States, and Vox called him "the man whose tweets helped kill DEI".
> In a 2023 essay, Hanania wrote that the only way to reduce crime is "a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won't appreciate it, whites don't have the stomach for it."
Interesting you mention human rights, the author seems to not care much about that issue.
Unions as you describe (mandatory membership for employment) is not the only way for unions to exist; in the Nordics unions are a core component of the labour market, and there are no jobs where union membership is required, it's all voluntary.
What exactly about unions, outside of the USA, in countries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, that trample human rights?
(I mean a lot of this discussion is fucked because healthcare is literally your life but the point still stands)
With socialised health care you don't just avoid the corporate tax of insurer profiteering, you're saving money in return for access to care when you need it.
Because - sooner or later - you will.
I'm not arguing about not telling someone to shut up in general; my argument is against telling people to shut up, and not complain, when they have grievances about the state of things outside of their individual power.
Yeah, that seems to be what the person you replied to was doing. They can't make other people not write these kinds of articles, after all.
Can we continue the discussion from this or are we supposed to keep this going until we need to reinvent legalese to cover all bases and have a conversation?
At no point I changed the meaning of anything I said, you required me to obviate what was already there because you wanted to pick a semantics discussion. Now that it's been obviated you decided it isn't good enough and that I'm changing meaning for convenience. Proving again that you not only missed the whole point but also is choosing to continue a semantics discussion, that's rather boring.
Again, I wholeheartedly recommend you reading the section on the "Technical Genius" of that article, you might identify yourself.