The Demoralization of The White-Collar Worker — No One's Happy

I bought my first home after nearly twenty years in the professional workforce. I saved aggressively, lived below my means, held a respectable salary for 95% of my career. When I finally bought, I had to leave Chicago. Chicago home prices have risen 175 percent since 2000, with some neighborhoods exceeding 260 percent. [1] The place I could afford comfortably was a rural town, far from the friends and career I’d built. 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. The median homeowner’s net worth is $400,000; the median renter’s is $10,400. [2] Even homeowners who bought at the peak of the 2006 housing bubble have gained $169,000 in equity, while renters over the same period fell $229,000 behind in relative wealth. [2] I wanted to escape renting badly enough to change my entire life. It took two decades of discipline to buy a house in a place I hadn’t planned to live. I am supposed to consider this a success.

Recently in the news there’s been a lot of discussion of “quiet quitting”. Not “antiwork” — that implies the worker chose leisure over effort. What I want to describe is the experience of putting in the hours and watching all that you work for be pulled away from you at a faster clip. Gallup has a name for the current version of it — the “Great Detachment”. I’m a relatively safe person, life choices are a calculation, and the choices I made regarding employment would never be considered risky. Yet here I am fighting for what I consider the basic expectations of “the American dream”.

Wages

From 1948 through the late 1970s, worker productivity and worker pay rose together due to strong unions, progressive taxation, and regulated markets.

Since 1979, American worker productivity has increased approximately 90 percent. Hourly compensation for typical workers has grown 33 percent. [3] The other 57 points of productivity growth went to executive compensation, to shareholder returns, to private equity, to corporate profits. Not to the bottom 80 percent of earners. If pay had tracked productivity as it did before 1979, the median worker would earn roughly 40 percent more than they do today. But we all know the extent of corporate greed in 2026, I won’t belabor it. White-collar salaries in new job postings have been flat since mid-2024, even as blue-collar wages continue rising. [4] White-collar job postings fell 35.8 percent between the first quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2025. Forty percent of white-collar workers who switched jobs in late 2024 took salary cuts of more than 10 percent — the highest rate in at least a decade. [5]

At my company, I have watched management lay off engineers with ten or more years of tenure so that they can hire someone younger at 50 percent of the cost. The replacements are cheaper but they are also less capable. Not because younger workers are inherently less skilled, but because institutional knowledge takes years to build. The result is predictable: quality has degraded, timelines have slipped, dysfunction has spread through teams that once ran smoothly, and the remaining experienced workers are more than aware that their tenure is not an asset. Executives use comparable companies as the excuse to make cuts claiming “We cannot compete unless we outsource seventy percent instead of our current fifty.”

The funds exist. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio at the lowest-paying S&P 500 firms reached 632:1 in 2024, up from 560:1 five years earlier. [6] Starbucks achieved a ratio of 6,666:1 — its CEO earned $95.8 million while its median worker earned $14,674. The same 100 firms spent $644 billion on stock buybacks between 2019 and 2024 enriching leadership. [6] Lowe’s alone spent $46.6 billion repurchasing its own stock — enough to have funded a $28,456 annual bonus for every employee for six years.

Housing

Home prices have risen 53 percent since 2019. Median household income has risen 24 percent. [7] The national price-to-income ratio sits at 4.6 — historically, 3.0 was considered the threshold of affordability. [8] As of 2025, 74.9 percent of American households cannot afford the median-priced new home. [7]

The generational numbers tell it more plainly. In 1981, the median first-time homebuyer was 29 years old, and first-time buyers made up roughly 40 percent of the market. Today, the median first-time buyer is 40, and they represent 21 percent of the market. [7] I bought at 41. A household earning $75,000 can afford 21 percent of current listings, down from 49 percent in 2019. Those fortunate enough to inherit family wealth or possess dual high incomes are indeed in a much more comfortable position when it comes to housing.

The competition is not only from other families, thanks to lobbyists and a lack of regulation. In the first quarter of 2025, investors — both institutional and individual —...