Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- 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.by rayiner
- > 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.
- "Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment."by api
- “Houses are for living, not for speculation.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
by toomuchtodo - > 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.
by smitty1e - 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.
by lotsofpulp - 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.
by simianwords - 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.by tedggh
- 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.by rapind
- 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.by lux-lux-lux
- > 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.)
- 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".
by Hfuffzehn - 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...
by akurilin - 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.
by api - > 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.
by Yhippa - It's because they don't have money to spend.by Exoristos
- 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 (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?
by beloch - 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.
by htunnicliff - You’d revolt? Against what?
- We need a new citizen run internet whose physical infrastructure is distributed and owned by people not companies.by noman-land
- > 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.
by bossyTeacher - There’s the DSA. Organized resistance to the cost of living crisis in NYC has been mostly organized through them, to great popularity.by arn3n
- 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.by aleqs
- 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.
by OldSchool - Have you assessed the size of United Healthcare?
The number of paper pushers and executives is sustained by your premium.
- 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.
by jazz3k - 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”.
by lotsofpulp - 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.
by Exoristos - 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.)
by Terr_