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 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.

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.

> 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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

"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 is different. Capital has been busy, its dialect 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".

The vibe-coder is the prolefication of the knowledge worker, the former purely-human mind, commoditized into a production-repitition. But, those are the lucky few. The rest become lumpenprole, economic invalids, non-essential and therefore irrelevant to global capital.