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.
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.)
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.
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.
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'?
No, I/P is a huge purity test for the DSA. They explicitly do not endorse people, for example AOC, for having any nuance in their position whatsoever. They are looney tunes.
Everyone in his entourage was talking about Israel as one of their top activist concerns, including his wife, and the new folks he just helped get elected. And he made notable 'statements' by avoiding certain events and other things.
Do you seriously think the bread and butter issues contributed nothing to his appeal? Palestine I'm sure is important but it's easy to dismiss affordability issues if they don't play a large part in your life.
Can anyone explain why they're so excited about immigration? It means downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on rents. Yet they claim they're doing it for the good of the current US residents. I can't figure it out.
The immigration issue is very much tied to race, for the DSA and much of the Progressive movement. Let us just say it is not Ukrainian immigrants they're losing sleep over protecting.
Your description of the DSA is completely unrecognizable from my experience at local DSA meetings.
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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
Isn’t it easier to wait for the minority opposition to age out versus moving? As long as young voters show up to vote, you just have to be on the ballot (as almost every election since the presidential election has shown). Perhaps you’re asking the wrong folks to move, as the future and the country belong to its youth, not its elderly (who, by definition, are time constrained).
“The dead should not rule the living." -— Jefferson
“Progress occurs one funeral at a time.” —- Max Planck
You can be on the plane tomorrow. If you're really committed to living under the beautiful Communist dream, it can be yours within 24 hours. 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?
And, btw, the youth are also time constrained. Sorry to burst your bubble.
I’m committed to universal healthcare, living wages, heavily subsidized or no cost education, affordable housing (even if it’s public or social, like the Vienna model) and high progressive tax rates. Call it whatever you want, but it’s certainly not communism. It’s less brutalist capitalism. I expect it to take 5-10 years to see progress, at least. I’m prepared for a long haul.
> 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.
That's a big if. Maybe you'll be right. But the odds are you'll find yourself like Germany as it watches Poland blast by it in GDP. Or maybe you'll be like England where recently 30k++ people were kicked off the National Health waiting list. Why? Because they died before the doctor could see them.
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.
You know, I thought, surely, by now, capitalists would be calling for reform to capitalism to prevent the weird ponzy scheme from shutting down, but it's the same clichés! Not even an interrogation of why people are souring to capitalism, just the same old tired response.
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.
Well, if you enjoy Trump era corruption, authoritarian strongman rule, and a great chasm between the haves and the have nots you can go to those countries as well. The options are open.
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.
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”.
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?
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 $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.
In the US, it is explicitly wealth redistribution, from the young and healthy to the old and sick. It is still called an insurance premium because it is more politically palatable.
Because there is no guarantee that the donors now will receive the same benefits when they are older. It's almost the opposite, given demographic trends. For example, 20 to 30 years ago, getting consultation by a doctor was easier, but now you often have to get consultation from a physician assistant, if you're lucky, or more likely a nurse practitioner, who are far less qualified than doctors.
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.
In 1993, it would have been. In 2026, he cannot be denied coverage due to Affordable Care Act passed in 2010.
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.
To be fair, I suspect lots of the increase in premiums comes from the removal of the individual mandate. If not everyone contributes, then any insurance system works much less well.
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.
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!
> 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.
Yes, but classically insurance wouldn't allow a guaranteed bad bet in. Health care is way worse then the classic 80/20 (20% of the people generate 80% of the costs). Pruning even just a fraction of these ultra high cost humans massively reduces the cost for everyone else which is what insurance companies used to do before the government stepped in.
(I mean a lot of this discussion is fucked because healthcare is literally your life but the point still stands)
The 20% of the people are likely to include nearly 100% of the population over time.
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.
> 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.
Health insurance companies have profit margins of 2%, and owning their stock gives you a terrible return. Buybacks are just a tax efficient way of giving out dividends, which is expected of any business, and a large portion of health insurers are non profits.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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. 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
https://ilsr.org/
https://www.fulu.org/
https://www.usworker.coop/directory/
https://atproto.com/
Thank you!
We need a new citizen run internet whose physical infrastructure is distributed and owned by people not companies.
There’s the DSA. Organized resistance to the cost of living crisis in NYC has been mostly organized through them, to great popularity.
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'?
Really? Because in practice DSA candidates seem very focused on bread and butter issues like affordability, housing, and M4A.
Like, Mamdani was the only NY Dem not talking about Israel, your description is seriously baffling.
No, I/P is a huge purity test for the DSA. They explicitly do not endorse people, for example AOC, for having any nuance in their position whatsoever. They are looney tunes.
https://dsaemerge.org/2026/04/05/no-iron-dome-no-exceptions-...
https://www.dsausa.org/statements/status-of-dsa-national-end...
Everyone in his entourage was talking about Israel as one of their top activist concerns, including his wife, and the new folks he just helped get elected. And he made notable 'statements' by avoiding certain events and other things.
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.'
Do you seriously think the bread and butter issues contributed nothing to his appeal? Palestine I'm sure is important but it's easy to dismiss affordability issues if they don't play a large part in your life.
Can anyone explain why they're so excited about immigration? It means downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on rents. Yet they claim they're doing it for the good of the current US residents. I can't figure it out.
The immigration issue is very much tied to race, for the DSA and much of the Progressive movement. Let us just say it is not Ukrainian immigrants they're losing sleep over protecting.
Your description of the DSA is completely unrecognizable from my experience at local DSA meetings.
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.
Only to the activist class.
Thankfully, Palantir and others were built to counter them.
> 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.
You’d revolt? Against what?
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)
I don't know how much I really trust polls when it comes to Americans and socialism. Look what happened in 2008
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.
Kiros is a good sign so far outside of NY, winning against a 30 year centrist incumbent in Colorado.
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.")
I hope you're right.
The easiest way to do this is to leave the US. Why not go to Cuba? Or Venezuela? Or Russia? The options are out there.
Isn’t it easier to wait for the minority opposition to age out versus moving? As long as young voters show up to vote, you just have to be on the ballot (as almost every election since the presidential election has shown). Perhaps you’re asking the wrong folks to move, as the future and the country belong to its youth, not its elderly (who, by definition, are time constrained).
“The dead should not rule the living." -— Jefferson
“Progress occurs one funeral at a time.” —- Max Planck
You can be on the plane tomorrow. If you're really committed to living under the beautiful Communist dream, it can be yours within 24 hours. 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?
And, btw, the youth are also time constrained. Sorry to burst your bubble.
I’m committed to universal healthcare, living wages, heavily subsidized or no cost education, affordable housing (even if it’s public or social, like the Vienna model) and high progressive tax rates. Call it whatever you want, but it’s certainly not communism. It’s less brutalist capitalism. I expect it to take 5-10 years to see progress, at least. I’m prepared for a long haul.
> 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.
That's a big if. Maybe you'll be right. But the odds are you'll find yourself like Germany as it watches Poland blast by it in GDP. Or maybe you'll be like England where recently 30k++ people were kicked off the National Health waiting list. Why? Because they died before the doctor could see them.
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.
You know, I thought, surely, by now, capitalists would be calling for reform to capitalism to prevent the weird ponzy scheme from shutting down, but it's the same clichés! Not even an interrogation of why people are souring to capitalism, just the same old tired response.
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.
Well, if you enjoy Trump era corruption, authoritarian strongman rule, and a great chasm between the haves and the have nots you can go to those countries as well. The options are open.
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.
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”.
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?
> Do we even know? Is it truly worth 1.5M?
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
https://www.asparlas.com/
And $100k+ for
https://www.blincyto.com/
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.
We use an insurance model. Get upset how insurance works. Then complain it’s broken. Either it’s insurance or it’s wealth redistribution.
In the US, it is explicitly wealth redistribution, from the young and healthy to the old and sick. It is still called an insurance premium because it is more politically palatable.
Unless you don’t intend to age, you too will become old and sick. As will, hopefully, almost everyone else.
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?
Because there is no guarantee that the donors now will receive the same benefits when they are older. It's almost the opposite, given demographic trends. For example, 20 to 30 years ago, getting consultation by a doctor was easier, but now you often have to get consultation from a physician assistant, if you're lucky, or more likely a nurse practitioner, who are far less qualified than doctors.
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.
Unless your (kid's) care is denied because it's a pre-existing condition. Or for some other pretext.
In 1993, it would have been. In 2026, he cannot be denied coverage due to Affordable Care Act passed in 2010.
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.
To be fair, I suspect lots of the increase in premiums comes from the removal of the individual mandate. If not everyone contributes, then any insurance system works much less well.
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.
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!
> 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.
Yes, but classically insurance wouldn't allow a guaranteed bad bet in. Health care is way worse then the classic 80/20 (20% of the people generate 80% of the costs). Pruning even just a fraction of these ultra high cost humans massively reduces the cost for everyone else which is what insurance companies used to do before the government stepped in.
(I mean a lot of this discussion is fucked because healthcare is literally your life but the point still stands)
The 20% of the people are likely to include nearly 100% of the population over time.
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.
> 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.
Have you assessed the size of United Healthcare?
The number of paper pushers and executives is sustained by your premium.
Premiums also pay large bonuses and stock buybacks!
Health insurance companies have profit margins of 2%, and owning their stock gives you a terrible return. Buybacks are just a tax efficient way of giving out dividends, which is expected of any business, and a large portion of health insurers are non profits.
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.
Have you seen the profit margins of pharma companies, hospitals, and doctor groups?
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?
> 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.
point 3 means basically optimize for not retaining wealth? =\
> 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.
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. 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Land is not very expensive in most suburbs
Compared to the farmland it used to be, it is significantly more expensive.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.