Why are Americans so unhappy?

Here's a very straightforward graph to help explain why Americans are so glum, and angry.

$A graph of 'compensation of employees, received' as a fraction of personal consumption expenditure$

(or on FRED.)

A simple interpretation of the graph is that until 1982, the "average" American household could afford more than 90% of average consumption out of labor income alone. You didn't need hereditary asset wealth, some accumulated chunk of savings, to lead an average life. You could just get a fucking job — an average fucking job, not some amazing "career" position you sucked dicks your whole life to qualify for — and your family could live something close to a full, normal American life with your head held high.

By 2010, the "average" American household could afford less than 80% of average consumption from labor income alone. That's not a full, normal, American life, but a substandard life, a lifestyle of losers. In the current era, a household needs either property wealth and income or someone with an extraordinary job to support full, normal lives. A household of people with average jobs and no other income now affords less than 75% of average consumption.

You can nitpick this interpretation. A substantial fraction of US households include no employed people. So, conditional on anybody working, labor income may provide close to 90% of the average! Whatever. The information is not in the absolute numbers, but in the rather shocking decline in labor income relative to the consumption that defines a normal life.

Discussions like this always devolve to questions of the average versus the median. Both compensation and consumption are "right skewed" — the average will be higher than the median. Maybe what the median, often taken to mean "typical", worker earns would not have declined so much relative to median, "typical", consumption?

But what "average consumption" is a proxy for here is the consumption that defines living "a full, normal American life with your head held high". The definition of a "full, normal" life is not a typical life, unless one presumes that "full, normal lives" are in fact typical. This essay is an attempt to explain the apparent opposite, that it is increasingly common for people to lead economic lives they do not consider full. An unhappy life might be normal in the sense of "common", but not at all normal in the sense of meeting society's norms about how a life is successfully led.

Norms about what constitutes a "normal" life in America are set by the upper middle class. Americans don't feel like losers because they can't live like Elon Musk lives. But they feel like losers if they don't have ready access to high-quality health care, if their schools aren't safe and solid enough to offer education and opportunities to kids who do the work, if those kids can't go to college without burying themselves in debt, if their neighborhoods aren't safe and well maintained and well served commercially. All of these are upper-middle-class goods in the United States. Just because the quality of normative goods has improved in absolute terms since, say, 1970 doesn't mean that it is discretionary whether one pursues them, or that households gain in self-perceived welfare by paying up for them. A family that contented itself with childrearing goods that were common in the 1980s — say, a key on a shoestring around the neck of a "latchkey kid" — today risks losing custody of their kids to child protective services. A person who in 1970 would have enjoyed living cheaply in a downtown SRO no longer has the option of that form of housing.

Broadly speaking, at any given time the consumption bundles that constitute a full, normal life are defined by what is typical among members of the upper middle class. There's no hard threshold. You can be poorer than whatever counts as upper middle class and live a normal life, as long as the life you can buy is not so far from the norms that class sets. But the greater the degree of consumption inequality, the greater the share of society that will be perceived, and most importantly perceive itself, as living something less than a full, normal life.¹

So using an average rather than a median for our numerator does not overestimate what we are interested in. But our denominator, average compensation, is an overestimate. We would prefer a ratio of average consumption (or even 80th to 90th percentile consumption) to median labor compensation. Our measure overestimates, rather than underestimates, the ability of a typical person to lead a full and normal life out of labor compensation alone.

A lot of discussions of "inequality" look at inequality within wage measures. That largely misses the point. The main dividing line in American life is between workers with few assets and the class of people who substantially supplement their consumption and economic security via asset wealth.

Between September 1969 and May 2026, the share of PCE that can be accounted for by labor compensation falls almost 24 percentage points. The share of "entrepreneurial" proprietors' income decreased over the period as well, adding an additional 3 percentage points of decline to explain. An increase in measured asset income (dividends and interest, basically) accounts for about 3 percentage points. An increase in rental income accounts for about 2 percentage points of the change. An increase in net transfer income accounts for about 11 percentage points of the change. And factors outside of the components measured as Personal Income account for an additional 11 percentage points of the change. Those outside factors include capital gains, realized and unrealized, as well as changes in the role of saving and borrowing for funding expenditures. Broadly, income from capital gains, spending out of savings, and/or borrowing (largely against assets as collateral) account for these remaining 11 percentage points.²

All in all, the role of work income, labor and entrepreneurial, declined by 27 percentage points. The role of asset-related income and borrowing accounts for about 16 of those percentage points, while the role of transfers accounts for about 11 of them.

It's worth discussing the role of net transfer payments. Under a very universalist transfer state, one might argue that the 11 percentage point increase in the role of transfers shouldn't make anybody glum. But the United States' transfer system is far from universal. Its beneficiaries are mostly the poor (whose modest means-tested benefits are unlikely to persuade them things are great), the old, veterans, the unemployed, and the self-identified disabled. Most working Americans are net contributors, rather than recipients of benefits. That doesn't make these benefits bad! Of course we want a social insurance system that receives a broad base of contributions and pays out to those who can't work or can't earn a great living when they do.

But from the perspective of working Americans without asset wealth, who are net contributors rather than net beneficiaries of these transfers, these payments contribute to income streams that are not theirs. Of course we should make the political case that insurance programs against sickness and unemployment, disability and poverty, and the debilitations of old age benefit everyone. But given the vast gap that has grown between labor income and full economic participation, it's understandably a hard sell to ask workers to be net contributors. One thing that would help is providing more universal benefits, so that payers perceive themselves more as purchasing benefits rather than funding charity. Another thing that would help would be reducing the barrier placed between labor income and full participation created by the increasing role of asset wealth.

In a decent society, it shouldn't be that bad to become penniless. One should always be able to pick oneself off the floor and afford a decent life from the wages of a job. Societies that allow their definition of a decent life to expand very far past what employment and universal benefits can typically buy are asking for turmoil and trouble.

Also, estimates of unhappiness based on consumption inequality alone will understate the problem. People will go to extraordinary lengths and take extraordinary risks to sustain what they take to be a normal life. A not inconsiderable share of those who seem to afford a normal life are in fact quietly suffering from financial precarity, the miseries that come when you know you are living on borrowed time and money.
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Declining tax rates may also have played a role, but over the period, non-payroll taxes decrease especially on asset wealth and unusually high incomes. (Payroll taxes increase, but are accounted for within net transfer income.)
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draft by Steve Randy Waldman
2026-07-06 @ 08:15 AM EDT

Multiple parties in government: A gadget toward accountability and action

In the previous post, we discussed why status quo multiparty democracy fails to adequately represent pluralistic publics, even though members of the public can cast votes for a rich menu of parties, including parties that ostensibly share their values and interests.

In a nutshell, the problem stems from the fact that (1) once elected, representatives must join heterogeneous coalitions in order to wield power; and (2) while those coalitions are heterogeneous in terms of party and ideology, they are homogenous in an orthogonal sense: all electeds share an interest in continuing to hold and wield power. Whoever we elect, whether in a two-party or multiparty system, we end up with a legislature made of incumbents who coordinate in large part to entrench, empower, and enrich incumbency. We are always governed, ultimately, by a governing coalition whose primary interest is to remain the governing coalition.

There is some hope, however, in the rump existence of those ideologically coherent political parties. What if we could get the parties to precommit to the actions that they would take if they could, prior to the intercession of intracoalitional politics? What if those commitments might actually become effective, become a status quo that the blob — the full governing coalition — would encounter as a fait accompli, a thing they could modify or correct only via visible, politically dangerous, action rather than deniable, politically invisible, inaction?

Here's the gadget:

Instead of treating the legislative process as piecemeal, one-at-a-time small changes, expect to produce one major bill per legislative session. This bill, in its initial draft, would not be produced by negotiations among the full parliament, or even among the full ruling coalition. No. Each party represented in the legislature would be responsible for crafting their own bill, their version of the perfect result of the current legislative session. All of these bills would be finalized among the legislators of each respective party, and then published prior to an agreed deadline. Then, one bill from the collection would be chosen at random, weighted by each party's share of the legislature, to become the first draft of the parliament's work for that session.

It would only be the first draft! Of course, the full body could and would amend it. However, any amendments would face a substantial supermajority requirement, something like the US Senate's de facto 60%. The "lottery vote" that yields the default proposal would not be merely ceremonial, then quickly rolled back to the same-old-same-old. It would have effect, except where a substantial consensus exists that sections must be modified, eliminated, replaced, or augmented. When, occasionally, proposals offered by smaller parties win the legislative session's lottery, amendments would likely be very substantial. But every change would be an overt action, visible to the public. The "sensible" supermajority of the legislature would have to affirmatively explain why the Weird Party's great idea (or the Racist Party's mass expulsion) would in fact be terrible and should not survive into law. When, more frequently, the proposal of a sizable party wins the legislative lottery, only a very strong consensus among the rest, supplemented perhaps by open dissidence among some members of the winning party, could smooth away rough edges.

This procedure would render parties suddenly very accountable. Party representatives would be accountable to their voters, because the proposal they draft would be purely an internal exercise. It would be their job and duty to craft what we, the party, believe the best way forward to be, without interference by or compromise with other members of any coalition. Representatives could, and undoubtedly would, craft their proposals with an eye toward maintaining broader support in the legislature should their draft be chosen. But no one could force what party rank-and-file would experience as painful compromises, and the supermajority requirement to amend means representatives would face a steep hill if they try to plead necessity for what their voters condemn as preemptive surrender.

Also, the parties would become accountable to the polity as a whole, because even for smaller parties, there would be a significant possibility their proposals would either be enacted or incur a great deal of public effort to defang. The public tolerates purely performative fringe parties whose ideas and promises are entirely unworkable, because they are expected always to be irrelevant as a practical matter. But unaccountable performativity is toxic to the actual work of governing. Under this system, a 5% fringe party's platform would have a sizable shot of doing mischief. Its proponents could become extremely unpopular if by chance their bad ideas become law, or if the parliament's work for a session is bogged down in publicly dissecting and eliminating their bad ideas.

This procedure would also counter the powerful incentives to inaction among elected representatives. The result of inaction would no longer be a tolerable, almost invisible, status quo. On the contrary, legislative timidity would mean acceding to a profound set of changes, enacting the vision of a single political party, sometimes even a fringe political party. Sitting quietly, under these circumstances, would no longer suffice as a strategy to avoid criticism and political risk. Not participating in the work of undoing reckless proposals that will take effect absent legislators' active intercession would become a lightning rod for criticism. The safe default would be eliminated. In each legislative session, both while drafting their party's proposal and working to correct the winning draft, representatives would be stuck actively, visibly expressing the values and interests they work in practice to advance.

This procedure might seem dangerous, but events in the United States, in Germany, in much of the (once) liberal democratic world prove that the status quo is dangerous.

Even under the proposed procedure, after the major law takes effect and its consequences become clear, corrections could continue to be made by the same supermajority that previously could have amended the law. It must always be possible for a supermajority to revise or undo obviously terrible law. In the end, in a democracy, a broad consensus should always rule.

Status quo electoral and legislative institutions currently obstruct formation of a broad, rough consensus. The very instability and dynamism inherent to this proposal might help remedy that. It would become less possible to stabilize and entrench rigid coalitions that mutually defer to what becomes a safe but democratically inadequate orthodoxy, and still maintain power by persuading voters that any deviation invites catastrophe.

Until, eventually, increasingly dissatisfied voters opt for catastrophe.

draft by Steve Randy Waldman
2026-06-16 @ 04:00 PM EDT

Multiple parties in government: A statement of the problem

Regular readers will know that I think multiparty government is essential if electoral democracy is going to be functional. Two-party "democracy" is a catastrophe. It deprives the electorate of parties they can vote for in which they recognize a close approximation of their own values, interests, and perspectives. Instead, voters have to make guesses, with neither the information nor expertise required, about what the role of people with their views would be in gigantic, ever-shifting coalitions, even while marketing arms of the two coalitions wheedle, pander, inflame, and lie in hopes of capturing their votes. Two-party democracy, once the parties have sorted and polarized, ensures we are collectively stupid. We get caught up in a dynamic of kneecapping the other party rather than attending to what has to be accomplished in the world. Two party systems stabilize at near 50% of influence each. This renders feasible, and so incentivizes, electoral corruption, since the most important elections often turn on small margins.

Fortunately, we understand why the United States has devolved to a two-party system. We also understand why it used to be more functional than it is now. Even though, because of how we conduct elections, the United States has always collapsed to two parties in each jurisdiction, in the past the politics of each jurisdiction were somewhat independent of those of the national party. Political scientists sometimes summarize this under the banner of "a hundred political parties", although that's an understatement. Local parties were also more independent of state parties. Nationalization of the economy and communications technology has made the United States, in essence, a single jurisdiction. All politics used to be local. Now all politics is national. We are sorted into just two party coalitions, over which no one has meaningful deliberative control. They subsist on least common denominators, on the ids of each of their shifting halves of the public. They behave accordingly.

So. The United States should reform itself, using tools like proportional representation and approval voting, to become a multiparty system in every jurisdiction. But, looking around, it's clear that multiparty democracy is not a panacea.

The most pathological multiparty democracies — Great Britain, France, and Israel, for example — present cautionary tales that are easy to explain, and easy to avoid. But even reasonably well-arranged multiparty democracies, like Germany, struggle. Part of this may be because "democracies" are not isolated, independent experiments. The most powerful, culturally salient, polity in the world has devolved into two rival ids, and much of the rest of the world takes its cues — culturally, economically, via professional norms and interconnections among media organizations — from the United States. The pathologies of the United States are the pathologies of the world. Good local institutions can provide only a partial bulwark.

Still, even before the lurid collapse of America into culture war and contagious idiocracy, it's hard to credit Europe's multiparty democracies with excessive success. Europe made the same broad economic mistakes as the United States, in terms of accepting a "golden straitjacket" under which societies grew increasingly plutocratic and insulated from democratic accountability. Much of that may be down to the democratic deficit built into the structure of the EU. But then, the polities that constitute the EU could do something about that, if they were effective and vigorous democracies.

The core institution of a representative democracy is its legislature, the decision-making minipublic whose role is to decide on behalf of the public, the demos, as a whole. Just as electoral systems can introduce pathology into how the values and interests of a diverse public become represented as a legislature, details of legislative institutions and parliamentary procedure can introduce pathology into how even an initially well-constituted minipublic produces outcomes. In 1789, when the United States stood up its flawed democratic institutions, it wasn't obvious they were flawed. "Let many candidates contest for office, and let whoever receives the most votes win!" sounds impeccably democratic, but this very procedure is what triggers the collapse of American democracy into binarism. I want to posit that a similar pathology haunts the most straightforward parliamentary procedure, "Let legislators propose legislation, let them propose and vote on amendments, let a final product become law if it achieves more than 50% of the vote!"

(It's worth noting that this is perhaps the most optimistic characterization of how contemporary parliaments and legislatures work. In practice there are large hurdles to legislators who want a vote on their proposals. Supermajoritarian institutions like the filibuster present another barrier. It's hard to characterize these often opaque procedures as better enfranchising all members of a pluralistic democracy on equitable terms than the simple procedure I described, though one can argue some procedures that serve as filters are necessary concessions to practicality.)

The reason why the naive but facially fair procedure described above fails is because votes are not isolated, independent actions, taken solely on their merits. Legislatures and parliaments are human institutions. Votes within the legislature function as favors, in ways that cannot in practice be avoided and that can't really be described as corrupt. Suppose a legislator is asked to vote on a matter to which they and their constituents are fairly indifferent. They could simply abstain. But they serve their constituents more effectively if they effectively delegate their vote to other legislators whose constituents do have a strong stake in the matter, and with whom they are often allied on other matters. Then, when their constituents require something to which those colleagues might be indifferent, they can expect the favor will be reciprocated. This kind of exchange engenders cohesion among blocs, coalitions of legislators, which will be more capable of coordinating in favor of outcomes they desire than legislators who treated each vote as an isolated, solely-on-its-own-merits question, ever could. These blocs naturally tend to fall along party lines.

In fact, this outcome is so natural and obvious and inevitable that, in nearly every multiparty democracy, it is institutionalized. Following an election, the expectation is some group of parties will negotiate and publicly form a coalition who agree to vote as a bloc on important decisions, most notably the appointment of ministers who will serve as the executive of the new government. This process effectively leaves the legislature divided into two de facto parties, defined by the governing coalition and those outside of it. Outside parties may seem to have little in common, in terms of the values and interests of the different groups of voters who elect them. But given the coordination of the governing coalition, in order to exercise any influence at all, outside parties have a strong incentive to come to coordinate with one another, albeit less formally and consistently than parties within a governing coalition do.

We began with the US case, and the problem that the electoral system causes the politics of a diverse and pluralistic electorate to collapse to binarism. We "solve" that problem by looking e.g. to Europe, with its multiparty democracies, but again we see a kind of collapse to binarism, just at the level of legislative coalitions rather than overt political parties. But the effect is quite similar! In the United States, most voters don't feel like their values and interests are faithfully represented by either of the two political parties. We vote for candidates of one or the other based on some kind of calculus of which of the two coalitions will deviate less terribly. In multiparty parliamentary democracies, we vote for parties that do more clearly express an allegiance to values and interests close to our own. But we understand that in practice their behavior will be governed by coalitional dynamics that are difficult to predict.

In both systems, we have learned that our values and interests will often be betrayed. In both systems, politicians discipline voters, rather than the other way around, by pointing out how much stronger their differences are with members of the other coalition than with the politicians whom they must hold their noses to support. The fact that the coalitions are so diverse internally — the Democrats and Republicans in the United States, the flock of governing parties in parliamentary democracies — cedes in practice to politicians in power tremendous freedom to pursue their own interests at the expense of the values and interests of those who elect them. After all, almost everything they do will please part and displease part of their coalition's voters. This freedom creates space for electeds to treat politics as an incumbency and seniority machine, or worse. It encourages them to pursue their personal interests, which are at best orthogonal to, and sometimes directly opposed to, the interests and values of the diverse factions that elect them.

This case can be overstated. The electorate does still impose some constraint. In the US, politicians can't consistently make decisions that nearly all subfactions of their party would consider betrayal and expect to be reelected. In Europe, voters can credibly threaten to switch to parties that typically work in coalition with the party they would abandon, or else to an outside party whose ideology is so in sync with their own that they are sure a reorganization of the coalitions to bring the party in would constitute an improvement, without risk of ceding power to parties they find terrifying. The binarism into which both systems collapse loosens the constraint that voters can impose upon their electeds, but does not entirely eliminate it.

Multiparty legislatures elected under proportional representation are straightforwardly superior to US-style first-past-the-post two-party-ism, because at least voters can discipline electeds by switching to other parties within their coalition, or to parties whose growth would lead to a desirable reorganization of the coalitions. (American voters lack any real mechanism to discipline incumbent legislators, except perhaps for primary challenges, which bring pathology as much as remedy, given the unrepresentative subset of the electorate that participates in them.) However, proportionally represented parliaments suffer from the same core deficiency as American democracy. Coalitional politics complicate attempts by voters to hold accountable those they elect, and so diminishes their capacity to insist, effectively, that electeds vigorously advance their voters' values and interests. Professional politicians in both US parties, but also in the governing coalition of a parliamentary democracy, share incentives to maximize continuing job security, seniority, power, and personal wealth. Given the softness of the constraint voters are able to impose, that often means serving powerful economic interests rather than their voters, mucking around with procedure and jurisdictional boundaries, and otherwise not acting as faithful and vigorous representatives of the people whose values and interests they are charged to represent.

It's very well to state a problem. In a follow up, I hope to suggest an experiment, a kind of gadget, that might help to address it.

draft by Steve Randy Waldman
2026-06-13 @ 05:10 PM EDT

Updated: Keynesian compromise

A significant update of Keynesian compromise was made on 2026-06-12 @ 02:35 PM EDT.

→ The previous version accidentally misquoted Rodrik, used the phrase "golden handcuffs" rather than "golden straitjacket".

The post was originally published 2025-04-20 @ 07:30 PM EDT.

This is an automatically generated post.

draft by Update-o-Bot
2026-06-12 @ 02:35 PM EDT

The fiduciary class

I want to riff a bit on this exchange between Kevin Elliot and Samantha Hancox-Li. (I hope they'll forgive that I've played around with formatting and added punctuation.)

Elliot: ...What's changed are norms surrounding representation & aspiration. Being an educated, cultivated person has become widely politicized in a wider environment of transgressive populist contempt for conventional respectability.

Hancox-Li: i think not unrelated to this is that the dems are steadily becoming the party of the professional-managerial class and are incredibly embarrassed about this. this of course mirrors the pmc itself, which instead of achieving class consciousness has achieved "class neuroticism", by which i mean: in practical terms members of the pmc devote much of their life's effort to becoming pmc while also remaining in deep denial that this is in fact their aspiration. i dunno tho i think being well-educated, decent, and prosperous is not a bad thing to aspire to. it might even be good actually. makes u think... i basically blame marx for this. the pmc is convinced that salvation needs to arise from the working class--hence the paradoxes discussed in "ultraliberalism," AND the essay's own prescription "go organize a shop floor".

I'm a person very much of the educated professional class. I encourage people to become educated and cultivated. Education and cultivation should embarrass no one.

(Cultivation, of course, includes moral sensibilities like, "it is cretinous to embarrass people solely for their purported lack of education or cultivation." When the United States was good, much of what made it good was a social oxymoron, promoting cultivation along with ostentatious disdain for putting on airs.)

Nevertheless, I do think that "we" — by which I mean the professional class — fucked up. And we are smart enough to kind of know it. Hancox-Li is right. We are embarrassed about something. But we are not so clear about what, so it comes through as neurosis. I'll suggest what I think we should, in fact, be embarrassed about, not in order to prescribe hairshirts, but so that we can just not do that anymore and then stand proud again.

In 2019, I offered the following tweet. I am unduly fond of it.

alignments and outcomes:

working class + professional class ⇒ social democracy

professional class + plutocrats ⇒ liberal plutocracy (“neoliberalism”)

working class + plutocrats ⇒ fascism

I think that during the period from the middle 1970s through the 2008 financial crisis, we, the professional class made a rather catastrophic error in judgment.

(Obviously I am overgeneralizing — we have always been a heterogeneous and fractious crew — but, you know. In general.)

The consensus among our class — which I shared! — was that our society was imperfectly but sufficiently a meritocracy, and that the basic frame of what came to be called "neoliberalism" was correct. A heavily marketized society was a society we-the-merited could succeed within, and it was also the form of society that would maximize all of our prosperity. The fact that our successes might be generously remunerated was not just a matter of private enjoyment, but reflected genuine social virtue. We had achieved a society in which one did well by doing good.

This was never accurate. But journalists, think-tankers, and academic social scientists who were willing to advance this perspective in their work could count on career success. Which contributed to a consensus (not least but not only within the discipline of economics) that this suspiciously self-flattering perspective was in fact true. It was "science". The people at the top of many fields embraced it. Dissidence became hard to distinguish from sour-grapes conspiracism.

"Liberal professionals" had been recruited into what John Kenneth Galbraith describes as the role of the modern conservative. They were "engaged...in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

They had, in other words — we had — become paid mouthpieces for the rich, who always want to be flattered that their wealth is merely a marker of their virtue, and who, more importantly, want their inferiors to believe that. Otherwise reformists, or, God forbid, revolutionaries, might emerge, and confuse among the public their causes for justice.

Some of us did pretty well, for a while. Academics could be surprisingly well paid. Software developers bought ranches. Finance became a philosopher's stone by which one could convert research and a love of mathematics into exorbitant prosperity.

What was not to like? The educated could thrive via the fruits of applying their education. The best educated economists assured us that for all the wealth we appropriated, it was less than the value we contributed. However great our opulence, it was less than our effective generosity. Follow the science.

All of this was bullshit. Society was not well-arranged. Even within the ranks of the professional-managerial class, most of us did not do so well. Like the broader world we helped to justify, our own fates became stratified and increasingly structured as lotteries most of us would lose, but whose outcomes one could rig via certain kinds of institutional attachments and social connections. The information superhighway meant the world was flat. It became more important than ever to go to Harvard.

Most of us ended up pretty miserable along with everybody else.

As Hancox-Li suggests, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be prosperous. We should all want to be prosperous!

But what it means to be prosperous is contested. One definition of prosperity might be a stable income sufficient to ensure a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

But there is also the fractal definition of prosperity implicit in the behavior of the very rich, under which no amount of wealth is sufficient. Wherever you rise to in the distribution, it looks to you the same as where you last were. You find yourself competing for positional goods, in tournaments whose outcomes become consequential to your actual welfare, not just to your vanity. There are always rivals who have more, or who at least are contesting for more. Either you continually accumulate, or you fall behind. "Prosperity" must always be pursued, but it can never be achieved.

During the neoliberal period, professionals increasingly adopted plutocrats' version of prosperity. First as aspiration, then as desperation. Eventually it became difficult not to join the race. Falling behind would have consequences for ones children. Failure might be forgivable, but opting out was irresponsible. Prestigious academics became consultants, expert witnesses, paid speakers, despite already commanding enviable salaries. Entrepreneurial means good, right? The version of prosperity we adopted was "more" rather than "enough".

To return to my little tweet, we professionals had effectively aligned ourselves with the plutocrats. The result was an economy that immiserated an ever growing share of the nonplutocrats, the less-educated, but also those in our own ranks who did opt out of the insatiable contest for more, or who simply failed at it.

That immiseration left the alignment democratically untenable. The less-educated, along with a so-called "downwardly mobile" fraction of the professional class, grew restive, hungered for some outsider to overthrow a game that made them losers and then insisted it was their own fault.

The wise decision would have been for professionals, as a class, to join the working class in a muscular play for social democracy. Unfortunately, the professional class was famously divided (cf the neverending 2016 Democratic primary), while plutocrats coopted a growing share of the working class via the person of Donald Trump. The result of a working class + plutocrat alignment has been and is fascism.

Hancox-Li is right to question paleo-Marxisms that presume the only way forward is the one conceived while the emerging form of work was tending steam-powered machines in labor-intensive factories. An objective alignment of workers' material interests against their bosses might still exist, but labor conditions under which that alignment would ever be likely to translate to effective organization have largely disappeared.

It is no answer, however, to imagine that Democrats should become the party of the professional-managerial class alone. Under a two-party system, the obvious problem is that people with advanced educations are unlikely to constitute a majority.

Plutocrats have long understood democracy is a system that inherently renders them naked and vulnerable, so they must somehow coopt sizable elements of other groups. In postwar, post-GI-bill, America, professionals do constitute a mass constituency, which can encourage a kind of hubris. A mass constituency we are, but still a minority. Our challenge should be more tractable than plutocrats': We are a greater fraction of the public, and we share a greater alignment of material interests with the rest of the public than plutocrats do. But plutocrats have outsize resources and a cohesiveness born both of commonality of interests and smallness of scale. Socialists proclaim solidarity. Plutocrats practice it, despite their personal rivalries and soap operas of mutual detestation.

Further, plutocrats will always be able to divide us. We are a class defined by pursuing unusual excellences on behalf of those willing and able to pay us. We are the people who perform the actual work of contesting politics on behalf of plutocrats, even where that politics is at variance with our own class interest. (Plutocrats pay handsomely to align our individual interests with their politics.)

We do have a weapon, though. What is it that Trumpists seek to undermine more than any other thing? What is their kryptonite? It the capacity for any form of authority to emerge whose pronouncements resist being bought. The standards and ethics of our professions, imperfect and compromised though they are, remain a constant threat. They are a threat not because we are numerous, but because despite the firehose of shit they flood the zone with, the liberal professions are institutions whose core purpose is to distinguish virtues from falsehoods in each of their many domains, and when we do that well, a broader mass public might find our views persuasive.

During the neoliberal era, we really did let our standards lapse. Yes, the anti-vaccine movement is catastrophic bullshit. But the medical profession really did allow itself to go along with the pretense that oxycontin was a not-so-addictive miracle drug, and that was never a supportable claim. Our vulnerability to the former is not unrelated to the latter. In a variety of ways, over the past few decades, we allowed ourselves to be seduced into a kind of betrayal of the bargain that must bind a democratic society to its experts and professionals:

We, the broad public, generally defer to your authority. You, the professionals, exercise that authority competently, in the interests of the public, in a manner structured to maximize rather than override the scope for individual and democratic choice under the actual objective constraints.

I think that if we want to recover the trust of the broader public, we need to acknowledge that we did succumb to the corruptions inherent in the increasingly unequal society whose emergence we helped to justify. We need to enact institutional changes that would make such failures less likely going forward. (I have ideas.)

Moreover, I think we need to overtly reconceive of ourselves. The connotations of the word "professional" contain a contradiction we must definitively resolve. Do we define ourselves as inheritors of great bodies of knowledge, bound by and stewards of ethical and epistemological standards which have been developed and refined over generations? Or do we define ourselves as people who do stuff for money, careerists essentially?

During the neoliberal era we pretended there was little contradiction in those two roles. That's about as clever an idea as the safety of oxycontin.

I'll end all this a bit pathetically, by proposing the lamest remedy imaginable, a rebranding. But maybe there is some mitigation in a rebranding whose intent is not to persuade customers, but the rebranded providers themselves, that they now are, or ought to be, different. I propose that the class formerly known as professional adopt the word "fiduciary" as its defining characteristic.

We are not in the business of selling our capacity to apply expert skills, to whomever is willing to pay us most, in our own interest. We are in the business of applying expert skills in the public interest, which we have an obligation to put before our own. Professionals, as a class, must be fiduciaries, not (just) to our own clients, but to the democratic public writ large.

That must go beyond mere aspiration. We must reshape our professions so it becomes plausible that our obligations to the public interest override our own interests. That means altering the structure, and ultimately compressing the potential scale, of compensation. Excellent professionals should prosper. There should be a degree of incentive to encourage activity and capability. But when extrinsic incentives become too strong, too "high-powered", they undermine virtue. We need a flatter structure of outcomes, one that does not so heavily penalize pursuit of excellences that are not so rare or novel, like teaching, care work, or the tedious, meticulous aspects of science. Among the most important thing professionals do is help adjudicate complicated tradeoffs. At best, outside incentive providers misunderstand these tradeoffs, and risk accidentally skewing outcomes. More often, incentive providers have parochial stakes in outcomes, and so the skewing is not accidental. We need to dramatically reduce the role of outside incentive providers in shaping how professionals behave.

draft by Steve Randy Waldman
2026-05-13 @ 06:45 AM EDT