The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker

https://nooneshappy.com/article/the-demoralization-of-the-white-collar-worker/

by njrc • 19 days ago

102 97 19 days ago

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/

Exoristos3• 19 days ago

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

robin_reala2• 19 days ago

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

felix-the-cat• 19 days ago

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.

beloch• 19 days ago

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 (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?

dominotw• 19 days ago

People who get sick and stay sick don't produce as much taxable income, so keeping citizens healthy is good.

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.

Exoristos3• 19 days ago

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.

Terr_2• 19 days ago

Right, it's not just a matter of demoralization in the sense if being unhappy, but also, er, de-imagination, where people consciously or unconsciously assume objective limitations and ceilings which don't actually exist.

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.)

matheusmoreira• 19 days ago

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.

toomuchtodo7• 19 days ago

“Houses are for living, not for speculation.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

api2• 19 days ago

"Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment."

akurilin• 19 days ago

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...

api2• 19 days ago

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.

Herring4• 19 days ago

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.

michaelhoney• 19 days ago

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.

Herring4• 19 days ago

Yes it was, by constantly rejecting the only cures: redistribution and unionization as socialism. Unregulated capitalism always trends 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. Institutions, and the electorate itself.

OldSchool• 19 days ago

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.

nobodyandproud• 19 days ago

Have you assessed the size of United Healthcare?

The number of paper pushers and executives is sustained by your premium.

lotsofpulp8• 19 days ago

Have you seen the profit margins of pharma companies, hospitals, and doctor groups?

edoceo• 19 days ago

Premiums also pay large bonuses and stock buybacks!

lotsofpulp8• 19 days ago

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”.

bushbaba• 19 days ago

We use an insurance model. Get upset how insurance works. Then complain it’s broken. Either it’s insurance or it’s wealth redistribution.

TheOtherHobbes3• 19 days ago

Unless your (kid's) care is denied because it's a pre-existing condition. Or for some other pretext.

mancerayder5• 18 days ago

All fine. The only part that I have trouble with in your message is the 1.5M number. Why should something like anemia cost 1.5M a year of treament? And out of that 1.5M a year to the hospital, how much goes to:

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?

jazz3k2• 19 days ago

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.

resoluteteeth• 19 days ago

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.

33MHz-i486• 19 days ago

The startup I started working for has a fake health plan,(no network, prior authz and reimbursement issues for everything serious). So I just priced our family of 4 for rudimentary PPOs on the BCBS in our state. Our COBRA offer was 2400, ACA Individual market was 2200-3300, Small group plan thru my wifes LLC was 1700-3000. These plans mostly have 6-8k deductibles and out of max out of pocket $17k.

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!

mancerayder5• 18 days ago

Health insurance stopped being insurance when the government forced them to cover everything. You are paying for risks that will never apply to you.

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.

titanomachy2• 19 days ago

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.

piva004• 19 days ago

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.

fluoridation4• 19 days ago

I find it a little funny that you're doing the same thing you're complaining about.

titanomachy2• 19 days ago

I wasn't really telling them to shut up. I agree with most of their points, but there's a sense of helplessness in the writing that I don't like. I see some of my friends do this and it doesn't feel like purposeful, effective striving for a better world, but neurotic obsession over things that they are incredibly unlikely to affect.

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.

9x39• 19 days ago

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...

Yhippa• 19 days ago

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.

Exoristos3• 19 days ago

It's because they don't have money to spend.

jazz3k2• 19 days ago

"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.

TheOtherHobbes3• 19 days ago

This is a variation on "Stop buying lattes and takeout and you too can become financially secure."

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.

9183726518• 18 days ago

I have ran the numbers, outside of a top 10 city, a single person can easily live a good life off of 40 to 50k a year.

htunnicliff• 19 days ago

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.

arn3n• 19 days ago

There’s the DSA. Organized resistance to the cost of living crisis in NYC has been mostly organized through them, to great popularity.

cmxch• 18 days ago

Only to the activist class.

Thankfully, Palantir and others were built to counter them.

mancerayder5• 18 days ago

The DSA has a narrow agenda: Israel is number one, second is immigration, racial and gender issues, maybe a distant other wish is actual socialist principles. In other words, it truly feels as though the left in the U.S., just as the right has done for years, narrowly focuses on culture and social issues... When economic issues should be the focus. "The rent is too high" stuff in NYC is just dressing - they only touched the rent stabilized units, which is half of the rental stock, and almost every mayor limits those increases. And it doesn't help anything.

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'?

aleqs2• 19 days ago

I think we need to build open/cooperative products and services to replace anything that is run/owned by less-than-moral entities, while boycotting those entities as much as possible. We need better open, fair and secure methods/protocols/tools/platforms for cooperating/organizing as well.

toomuchtodo7• 18 days ago

https://ilsr.org/

https://www.fulu.org/

https://www.usworker.coop/directory/

https://atproto.com/

theoreticalmal• 19 days ago

You’d revolt? Against what?

toomuchtodo7• 19 days ago

America’s flavor of Capitalism, through politics and policy, to center the human over capital.

(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)

bossyTeacher• 18 days ago

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.

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.

noman-land• 18 days ago

We need a new citizen run internet whose physical infrastructure is distributed and owned by people not companies.

SpicyLemonZest• 19 days ago

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. 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.)

Hfuffzehn• 18 days ago

Agreed.

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".

tedggh2• 19 days ago

It seems that per sf house prices haven’t gone up that much. We romanticize the idea of older generations being able up afford a home, but those houses were a lot smaller than they are today, the average size I think was around 1500 sf, and a family of 5 lived there. Cities were also not as livable as they are today. Take for example NYC in the 1970s and 80s, where a young photographer could afford an apartment in Manhattan, with the caveat that the area was riddled with crime. Then there are the city ordinances that discourage multi family housing, so if you are a builder and you need to decide whether spend years fighting in court vs going to the suburbs and build large homes, that’s a very easy decision to make. The current housing deficit sits around 3-4 million homes.

rapind2• 19 days ago

Per sf comparisons blatantly ignore the bonkers increases in land prices. Good luck finding a 1500 sf house, let alone one with a backyard that hasn't completely outpaced inflation.

tedggh2• 19 days ago

Land is not very expensive in most suburbs, but houses have become huge, the average size in the area where I live is 2700 sf. That’s because building a 3000 sf home doesn’t take twice the time and labor a 1500 sf takes, so there’s an economic incentive to build bigger homes. People also look for more space today than 40 years ago. A 1500 sf house would be considered a very small house and would likely be very hard to sell. Again, the average sf price remains in the low $200, so that’s not a huge difference to 40-50 years ago, factoring inflation. Not to mention you get much better quality materials, appliances and construction today. So, the fix appears to be more small homes, ideally condos, in urban areas just like many other countries do. The problem is, it is technically impossible to build multi family in most cities in America due to the ridiculous zoning laws and ordinances by city governments and neighborhood associations. If you own a lot in a city neighborhood and try to build an apartment building you will likely face years of court battles.

lux-lux-lux2• 18 days ago

Reminder for any ‘houses used to be smaller’ rationalizations of home prices that the median homebuyer is now in their late fifties; these are rich people with decades of inflated wealth buying rich people goods, not a shift in preferences by younger homebuyers.

smitty1e• 19 days ago

In 1980, 38 percent of private-sector workers had defined-benefit pension coverage. By 2023, that number had fallen to 11 percent. [15] Government workers, who have the political power to maintain the old arrangement, still have pensions at a rate of 75 percent. [15] The private sector abandoned the model because it could. I wish I’d known when I was young what I know now about government jobs.

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.

lotsofpulp8• 18 days ago

The argument has no heft at all, because it ignores the laws that require actually funding a defined benefit pension plan, such as ERISA 1974 and PPA 2006, which exempt taxpayer funded pension plans from any and all funding requirements.

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.

wmorgan• 18 days ago

Yeah, it’s hard to reconcile the assertions by the author, that he has contributed in a "disciplined" way to his 401(k), and he’s 41, and he doesn’t think his savings will replace his income. The S&P 500’s total return over the past twenty years has been around 11%, annualized. That’s on track to millions, maybe even tens of millions for him by retirement age.

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.

rayiner• 18 days ago

The politics of AI replacement are going to be brutal. After sneering “go to college” to the people whose jobs were shipped to China, I can’t imagine white collar workers will get much sympathy when their jobs are replaced by AI.

simianwords• 18 days ago

This article is the usual self victimisation rut but it comes with an interesting irony.

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.

The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker

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