I do not know what comes after the recognition. The broader public directs its outrage at whatever the algorithm surfaces […] while the structural rearrangement of their economic lives proceeds without organized resistance.
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.
This is a very thorough overview, well put together.
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.
> This is not a spending problem. Families spend less on clothing, food, and appliances than a generation ago, adjusted for inflation. [19] The increase is entirely in fixed, non-discretionary costs: housing, healthcare, childcare, education.
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.
I totally agree on the healthcare thing, a few years ago I was working as an independent contractor and my health insurance premiums were almost $25k a year, for a plan with a $6.5k deductible. It’s bananas if you need to buy private health insurance.
The U.S. health system is incentivized in a way that's simply not sane.
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, 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?
I worked as consultant at a major west coast-based health insurer in 1993. A family plan, that is, two adults plus any number of children, was $300/month; a figure that wasn't far off from the cost of a studio or 1 BR apartment at that time anywhere but the most expensive coastal cities.
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.
I'm not sure where you live, but I'm a consultant and buy my own health insurance for a family of 4. I pay around $1200/month. This includes doctor visits and prescriptions.
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.
> Health insurance stopped being insurance when the government forced them to cover everything. You are paying for risks that will never apply to you.
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.
Because your 1993 health insurance covered far less.
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”.
Housing inflation cascades down into everything else too, since people require higher wages to afford housing... which drives up housing costs... which requires higher wages to afford housing...
Basically real estate is the thirsty sponge that soaks up all the gains.
> The demoralization of the American white-collar worker is not a universal condition of modernity. Workers in comparable economies face the same global pressures — inflation, housing costs, technological disruption — and they are not demoralized in the same way, because their systems absorb the shocks that American workers absorb individually.
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.
Does it make people feel better to write articles like this? I feel like we all know this stuff already.
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.
Without loudly complaining there is absolutely no change. Shutting up has never improved anything.
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.
I think it would have to be more of a professional organization, and realistically that would require a lot more rigor and discipline in our profession. Maybe to start with, model something like LOPSA[0].
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.
“Unions trample human rights” is such an absurdist statement that I don’t even know how to respond. The vast majority of the countries at the top of any human rights index have strong union cultures, and the vast number of those at the bottom have no unions at all.
> Between 2008 and the early 2010s, Hanania wrote for alt-right and white supremacist publications under the pseudonym Richard Hoste.
> 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".
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?
"The people living inside these numbers describe them in nearly identical terms. “All my life, I thought that was the magical goal, ‘six figures,’” one writes. “During the pandemic, I finally achieved this magical goal… and I was wrong.” Sixty-two percent of American consumers live paycheck to paycheck; among those earning over $100,000, the figure is 48 percent."
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.
Another, less quantitative, way to think about it is that, for a brief blip in history, there existed a finer stratification of society. Where there once was the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie, and proletariat, that simple model became obviously insufficient. We created terms like middle class, an entirely new class of non-capital owning worker of petit-bourgeois level flows, then divided that into sub-strata: upper-middle, lower-middle, etc. This middle class was a not just a destination, but a potential way-station towards capital ownership. Capitalism distributed. More wealth, more winners.
Now, we're experiencing a great re-flattening, a reverse-differentiation. As the middle class disappears, will we resurrect the old economic gods, and with it, its demons?
Or, is it different this time? Does Marx suddenly become proletarian-prophet again, evangelizing a reframing of the proletariat relation with capital? I think we all sense that no, this time it really is different. Capital has been busy, its dialectic a linear progression towards its own self-knowing. This time, capital doesn't need us, doesn't need our minds, hence the popularity of terms like "permanent underclass": hands and minds excluded from the economic covenent of mutually-beneficial exchange.
The vibe-coder is the prolefication of the knowledge worker, the formerly-essential human mind, commoditized into a production-repitition. Even the most critical components of our economic system, the software that runs the world, is now produced on an assembly line by proles. Those proles pull the lever, again and again, in the hope of rolling a fixed bug or implemented feature. But, those are the lucky few. The rest become lumpenprole, economic invalids, non-essential and furthermore irrelevant to global capital. For them, capital's becoming is their unbecoming, katabasis into the abyss of economic non-being.
It’s not like Americans were invaded and forced to accept this. They repeatedly voted for it. Obama tried to work on healthcare, then had the largest electoral losses since Eisenhower, all up and down the ballot. Instead they voted for the real-estate billionaire. Trump has zero healthcare during a major pandemic - crickets. This country doesn’t want anything labeled “socialism”, and will hurt itself repeatedly to prove it. Last time it took a Great Depression to change their minds.
This is true but it is not the whole story. Both establishment parties have presided over and encouraged the financialization of real estate. The ludicrous CEO-to-worker pay multiple wasn’t voted for by anyone.
Yes it was, by constantly rejecting the only cures: redistribution and unionization as socialism. Unregulated capitalism tends towards concentration of wealth/power.
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.
Get used to it, we have a lot more people that will be coming in and they all need to be taken care of. Unsustainable lifestyles are going to have to give way. We can’t all eat beef and have air conditioning and travel in retirement if we’re going to share this planet.
I do not know what comes after the recognition. The broader public directs its outrage at whatever the algorithm surfaces […] while the structural rearrangement of their economic lives proceeds without organized resistance.
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.
There’s the DSA. Organized resistance to the cost of living crisis in NYC has been mostly organized through them, to great popularity.
This is a very thorough overview, well put together.
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.
[delayed]
> This is not a spending problem. Families spend less on clothing, food, and appliances than a generation ago, adjusted for inflation. [19] The increase is entirely in fixed, non-discretionary costs: housing, healthcare, childcare, education.
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.
It's because they don't have money to spend.
I totally agree on the healthcare thing, a few years ago I was working as an independent contractor and my health insurance premiums were almost $25k a year, for a plan with a $6.5k deductible. It’s bananas if you need to buy private health insurance.
The U.S. health system is incentivized in a way that's simply not sane.
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, 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?
I worked as consultant at a major west coast-based health insurer in 1993. A family plan, that is, two adults plus any number of children, was $300/month; a figure that wasn't far off from the cost of a studio or 1 BR apartment at that time anywhere but the most expensive coastal cities.
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.
I'm not sure where you live, but I'm a consultant and buy my own health insurance for a family of 4. I pay around $1200/month. This includes doctor visits and prescriptions.
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.
> Health insurance stopped being insurance when the government forced them to cover everything. You are paying for risks that will never apply to you.
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.
Have you assessed the size of United Healthcare?
The number of paper pushers and executives is sustained by your premium.
Because your 1993 health insurance covered far less.
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”.
We use an insurance model. Get upset how insurance works. Then complain it’s broken. Either it’s insurance or it’s wealth redistribution.
Reminiscent of the Vibecession analysis done by Scott Alexander a few months ago: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-m... - may be good supplemental reading
And of course the evergreen Housing Theory of Everything https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Housing inflation cascades down into everything else too, since people require higher wages to afford housing... which drives up housing costs... which requires higher wages to afford housing...
Basically real estate is the thirsty sponge that soaks up all the gains.
> The demoralization of the American white-collar worker is not a universal condition of modernity. Workers in comparable economies face the same global pressures — inflation, housing costs, technological disruption — and they are not demoralized in the same way, because their systems absorb the shocks that American workers absorb individually.
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.
> I had to ask myself why I can’t afford a nice home in a major city.
> 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.
“Houses are for living, not for speculation.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
"Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment."
Does it make people feel better to write articles like this? I feel like we all know this stuff already.
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.
Without loudly complaining there is absolutely no change. Shutting up has never improved anything.
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.
Reminder (which the article mentions only once in the context of worker productivity and pay growth): https://ethanmarcotte.com/books/you-deserve-a-tech-union/
I think it would have to be more of a professional organization, and realistically that would require a lot more rigor and discipline in our profession. Maybe to start with, model something like LOPSA[0].
0. https://lopsa.org
I’m a Unionen[1] member, so at least in Sweden this isn’t a requirement.
[1] https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen
Reminder: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/unions-are-not-the-way-to-h...
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.
“Unions trample human rights” is such an absurdist statement that I don’t even know how to respond. The vast majority of the countries at the top of any human rights index have strong union cultures, and the vast number of those at the bottom have no unions at all.
Wonder how many metrics are out there that we could use to compare "unions trample human rights" vs "unchecked corporations trample human rights"?
Like which one more frequently monitors your time in the bathroom?
> Between 2008 and the early 2010s, Hanania wrote for alt-right and white supremacist publications under the pseudonym Richard Hoste.
> 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".
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?
"The people living inside these numbers describe them in nearly identical terms. “All my life, I thought that was the magical goal, ‘six figures,’” one writes. “During the pandemic, I finally achieved this magical goal… and I was wrong.” Sixty-two percent of American consumers live paycheck to paycheck; among those earning over $100,000, the figure is 48 percent."
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.
Another, less quantitative, way to think about it is that, for a brief blip in history, there existed a finer stratification of society. Where there once was the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie, and proletariat, that simple model became obviously insufficient. We created terms like middle class, an entirely new class of non-capital owning worker of petit-bourgeois level flows, then divided that into sub-strata: upper-middle, lower-middle, etc. This middle class was a not just a destination, but a potential way-station towards capital ownership. Capitalism distributed. More wealth, more winners.
Now, we're experiencing a great re-flattening, a reverse-differentiation. As the middle class disappears, will we resurrect the old economic gods, and with it, its demons?
Or, is it different this time? Does Marx suddenly become proletarian-prophet again, evangelizing a reframing of the proletariat relation with capital? I think we all sense that no, this time it really is different. Capital has been busy, its dialectic a linear progression towards its own self-knowing. This time, capital doesn't need us, doesn't need our minds, hence the popularity of terms like "permanent underclass": hands and minds excluded from the economic covenent of mutually-beneficial exchange.
The vibe-coder is the prolefication of the knowledge worker, the formerly-essential human mind, commoditized into a production-repitition. Even the most critical components of our economic system, the software that runs the world, is now produced on an assembly line by proles. Those proles pull the lever, again and again, in the hope of rolling a fixed bug or implemented feature. But, those are the lucky few. The rest become lumpenprole, economic invalids, non-essential and furthermore irrelevant to global capital. For them, capital's becoming is their unbecoming, katabasis into the abyss of economic non-being.
It’s not like Americans were invaded and forced to accept this. They repeatedly voted for it. Obama tried to work on healthcare, then had the largest electoral losses since Eisenhower, all up and down the ballot. Instead they voted for the real-estate billionaire. Trump has zero healthcare during a major pandemic - crickets. This country doesn’t want anything labeled “socialism”, and will hurt itself repeatedly to prove it. Last time it took a Great Depression to change their minds.
This is true but it is not the whole story. Both establishment parties have presided over and encouraged the financialization of real estate. The ludicrous CEO-to-worker pay multiple wasn’t voted for by anyone.
Yes it was, by constantly rejecting the only cures: redistribution and unionization as socialism. Unregulated capitalism tends towards concentration of wealth/power.
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.
Get used to it, we have a lot more people that will be coming in and they all need to be taken care of. Unsustainable lifestyles are going to have to give way. We can’t all eat beef and have air conditioning and travel in retirement if we’re going to share this planet.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-census-projections-sh...