The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker
nooneshappy.com
nooneshappy.com
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.)
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.
The number of paper pushers and executives is sustained by your premium.
This is all public information, there are 7 different publicly listed insurers to look up 10-Ks for and all the various Kaiser, Cambia, and other BCBS non profit orgs also have open financials.
However, pharmaceutical companies do have 20%+ profit margins, and do have phenomenal returns, and do do buybacks, since they can afford it. Next up is probably the software companies (Epic, etc), the legal firms, the hospitals, and the doctor groups.
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”.
How is it wealth redistribution when most people will start as recipients, then move to being the donors and will then become the recipients again?
Also, ACA started in 2010, so all the people receiving the most healthcare now (age 50 to 65) had a good chunk of working years where they never paid into the system, but they received a lot of benefits. Also, there is no mandate to pay the premiums in the US, so many people don't pay into it at all, until they need the healthcare.
However, because more people are getting more healthcare, like my son, premiums are higher. Which, as I explained, are not premiums, but rather taxes. So OldSchool is comparing a $300 per month premium with benefit maximums to $3,000 per month taxes, which are not comparable.
And it’s not the insurance companies that cause the $3,000 premiums, it’s the medicine manufacturers and hospitals and doctors. My son is on medication that costs $80k per dose, and each infusion visit is $10k at least. And, of course, the legal liability each step of the way.
a) administration b) health care claims administration (a huge %age of the gap) c) private equity profit numbers
Do we even know? Is it ruly worth 1.5M?
I ask because an MRI costs thousands in the U.S. And if I go oversees and pay out of pocket it costs something like $300 out of pocket - and I'm talking the U.K. here, not Turkey or Mexico. How do you explain that?
I don’t know what worth means, but the price is the price. I can see all the bills that the insurance company pays the hospital, and the hospital collects $80k per dose of medicines like
And $100k+ for
And $10k to $15k for other infusions (can happen two times per week).
The hospital is owned by the government.
In general, pharmaceutical companies have huge profit margins and profits, and doctors earn a decent amount of money in the US, especially specialists. Also, liability is huge in the healthcare space, with awards in the millions and tens of millions.
>How do you explain that?
Bottom line is a lot of people earn a lot less money in other countries.
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.
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.
(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.
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!
Your entire message is extremely localized to your state. In New York State, the state marketplace a, are only HMOs with limited networks, b, are expensive with high deductibles, c) don't have all that much coverage. In California, by contrast, the plans are a lot more extensive.
In many states, no one pays 1200 a month for a family. My COBRA would be 1200 a month, and if I went with a marketplace plan probably closer to 800. Me. Alone.
And yes, paying for risks that don't apply to you is how insurance has to work, or the insurance companies go bankrupt.
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.
Thankfully, Palantir and others were built to counter them.
What happened to "Medicare for All" being #1? How did we get here, that Israel and ICE are number 1? Did we not learn from the Right about 'Wedge Issues'?
Like, Mamdani was the only NY Dem not talking about Israel, your description is seriously baffling.
That's entirely besides the point - the folks who voted for him voted for him in part because of his Israel stance. I'm sure you know he's in the DSA, and the DSA https://www.dsausa.org/statements/until-palestinian-liberati....
I hope with an open mind you are no longer 'seriously baffled.'
https://dsaemerge.org/2026/04/05/no-iron-dome-no-exceptions-...
https://www.dsausa.org/statements/status-of-dsa-national-end...
Nobody in my area cares much about Israel (outside of the handful of months between Biden dropping out and Harris losing, I can’t recall it coming up). Currently we’re organizing for food banks (SNAP cuts have really hurt our community) and trying to prepare for the chaos of Haitians and others losing TPS and possibly getting deported.
(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)
“The dead should not rule the living." -— Jefferson
“Progress occurs one funeral at a time.” —- Max Planck
And, btw, the youth are also time constrained. Sorry to burst your bubble.
> Do you really think that it's going to just be Mamdani victory after Mamdani victory going forward and that in 10-20 years you'll be living in paradise?
If young people keep voting for democratic socialist candidates and old voters and representatives keep aging out, yes, I see a positive political and policy trajectory to achieving progressive policies. It’s simply demographics and electorate turnover. It’s wild to me these are considered radical ideas, but humans are tricky, emotional, and driven by rigid mostly low information mental models.
And, hey, you've got low cost education already. It's called YouTube and Udemy and Coursera, but I'm sure you've got some nutty dream that only includes huge leafy campuses and aging Marxist professors like Donald Sutherland in "Animal House." It's some old vision of what "education" might be. But I'm here like the Mayor in "Wizard of Oz" to tell you that you and your cohort already has the power thanks to the Great Capitalist engine of Silicon Valley that built the Internet.
One of these days the public housing projects in Vienna will get the Internet. I'm sure.
Make sure you do 5 prayers to Bezos and another 5 to Thiel on your capitalism rosary ($14.99/month subscription). If you've run out of prayers for the month, they actually have a sale for the 4th of July, $8.99 gives you 12 more prayers! Golly, I could use those two extra prayers to pray to Musk.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx (first graph)
Democrats saw what seemed like a massive opportunity, took it, got punished very hard for 20 years.
Issues of culture are sticky. I think it could take many decades for Americans to unlearn their brand of toxic individualism. Maybe centuries.
Democratic socialist Melat Kiros poised to become the first Gen Z woman in Congress - https://www.npr.org/2026/07/01/nx-s1-5876122/colorado-primar... - July 1st, 2026
Arizona is up next for testing and observing via election.
Democratic Socialists are winning elections nationwide. Is Arizona Next? - https://www.azfamily.com/2026/07/04/democratic-socialists-ar... - July 3rd, 2026
Paul Krugman: There Are Very Few Socialists in America, but most of us are social democrats - https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/there-are-very-few-social... - July 2nd, 2026
> Issues of culture are sticky. I think it could take many decades for Americans to unlearn their brand of toxic individualism. Maybe centuries.
Strongly agree. Much work ahead to change the dysfunctional American culture around hyper individualism. I hope it can be done in only a generation or two. My mental model on this is US religiosity decline.
This is Not Simple Generational Replacement - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/can-millennials-save-t... - April 23rd, 2026
When Are Half Your Members Going to be Dead? - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/when-are-half-your-mem... - January 29th, 2026
The Generational Collapse of American Religion - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-generational-colla... - January 19th, 2026
Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World - https://news.gallup.com/poll/697676/drop-religiosity-among-l... - November 13th, 2025
Some fun YC history I think is tagentially related to this topic of culture:
Interview with Mr. Money Mustache - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15348384 - September 2017 (284 comments) ("Don't start a blog, start a cult.")
> The results indicate that even with a number of self-described democratic socialists on the ballot, Democrats will have the upper hand heading into November’s midterm election, which is widely viewed as a referendum on Trump. It also suggests voters are warming to the idea of a more muscular federal government that provides additional services in exchange for higher taxes.
> The poll found that 32% of registered voters would be more likely to vote for a candidate if they describe themselves as a democratic socialist, while 50% would be less likely to vote for such a candidate. Twenty-nine percent of voters would be more likely to vote for a candidate with Trump’s endorsement, while 52% would be less likely. A candidate who describes themself as a supporter of the MAGA movement does even worse, with only 27% of voters saying that would make them more likely to vote for them and 57% saying it would make their vote less likely.
> Capitalism remains more popular than socialism in the U.S., the poll found, but has declined in public sentiment in recent years as socialism has gained.
> Twenty-eight percent of registered voters polled viewed socialism positively, a leap up from 18% in 2024. Fifty percent of registered voters viewed capitalism positively, little changed from 51% in 2024. Forty-eight percent of voters viewed socialism negatively, while 27% viewed capitalism negatively in the poll released Friday.
> Voters aged 18-34 preferred socialism by a margin of 18% points, while older age demographics preferred capitalism. That could reshape the electorate in the future. Or today’s younger voters could evolve their preferences as they age.
> “If these current attitudes were to persist over time, and the 18-49 year-olds of today were going to keep those types of attitudes, we’re going to have a seismic shift in terms of the national conversation and economic policy prescriptions that we see coming out of Congress and different places over time,” said Micah Roberts, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies, the Republican pollster for the survey. “The attitudes of 18-34 year-olds today are the reality of our country in 20 years.”
> Voters polled did not believe some form of socialism would be a good idea for the country, but by an extremely narrow margin. Forty-four percent of voters polled said some form of socialism would be a bad thing, while 40% said it would be a good thing — winnowing the gap by half from the last time it was polled. In a 2019 Gallup poll, 43% of adults viewed socialism as a good thing and 51% viewed it as a bad thing.
You are assuming it hasn't. And besides, are you a revolution to come by way of your instagram/tik tok/Facebook feed? It won't. It's like a relationship, if everyone expects everyone else to make the first move, everyone loses.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Demoralization in e.g. Germany has reached insane levels.
This is a problem of the direction things are going. Things are getting worse and that is causing the demoralization, not the absolute level of "how good things still are".
Compared to the farmland it used to be, it is significantly more expensive.
The article states the often quoted Wages vs Productivity gap. But wages didn't track productivity for the simple reason that the top 10% of people were paid much higher and consume disproportionately higher.
Who do you think the top 10% mostly comprises of? White collar people. So the article mourns for the same people who were responsible for and benefactors of the wage vs productivity pay gap LOL.
Hard to take this seriously.
I wish I'd had better tools for budgeting and retirement accounts.
This argument would have much more heft if it discussed 401k accounts and financial planning.
The private sector abandoned the model because the promises only made sense with fantasy accounting, and once that was reigned in, they didn't have the power to tax future generations, so they naturally went away. Also, the government pays under market for labor, because the government employee unions prioritize not being able to be terminated today and deferred compensation over higher, market rate compensation today.
It's a moot point anyway, since nearly free target date mutual funds and index ETFs exist where you can get all the benefits of stock market gains without any of the agency risk and cost of pension fund managers and employees. They have been obviated.
Maybe he's nervous comparing the top-line number in his retirement account to his expected expenses, but (a) he's got 25 years of compounding ahead, and (b) anything else he manages to save in the meantime -- including on his mortgage -- is going to help as well.
> 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...
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.
Even pretty basic economic models which start in a fair state with unbiased rules can easily converge on gross inequality.
The article seems to be subscribe-walled now, but IIRC it's a good one:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inev...
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.
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.
I hope the complainers win, and I will join their fight in ways that make sense, but I'm also not going to spend my one short life doing the equivalent of being angry at the weather. I'm going to figure out how to live a good life within the world as it exists, and help out other people wherever I can.
Of course, I could be reading them incorrectly. Perhaps writing this like this fills them with purpose and holy fire, and this is how they live their best life.
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...