[beisner]

I’m not sure that’s true. The people who have agency to move don’t need to; Highly-skilled knowledge workers are already being showered in benefits and compensation in the USA. This is definitely true in tech, and increasingly true in conventionally “high-status” professions (ie finance, consulting, strategy, etc).

A lot of people talk about the 1%, but there’s a separate, massive quality of life divide (especially at work) between the top 10% and bottom 90% of workers. Working conditions have never been better for the top 10%, and are getting worse for the rest.

So while there are definitely other immediate negative consequences to the US not having these benefits unilaterally, the fact that they already exist for the richest/most-educated makes me skeptical we’ll see an exodus of that demographic.

[Orou]

Do you have any data you could share on the 10%/90% divide when it comes to working conditions? I assume you're talking primarily about compensation and benefits here.

One of the interesting things about the American work system to me is that even high-status, highly-paid careers are still built around 60+ hour work weeks for many. The system doesn't seem geared towards life balance at all, it seems geared toward giving outsized rewards to workaholics for whom there is little going on in life besides their jobs.

[scott_s]

It's not on working conditions, but the phenomenon itself: "The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy", https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...

Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law School professor, has a recent book, "The Meritocracy Trap" that goes into your last paragraph. I heard about it on an interview with Ezra Klein (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show/e/6...), and Vox has a good summary of it (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/...), with a section that is very similar to what you wrote:

> In order to win this competition, elites are forced to exploit their own talents and abilities. They spend their lives acquiring the degrees, skills, attitudes, and habits (i.e. “human capital”) that makes them valuable to elite educational institutions and employers. In doing so, elites, Markovits writes, transform themselves into “asset manager[s] whose portfolio contains [their] own persons.” This process damages the very identity of its participants.

> > [Elites] become constituted by their achievements, so that eliteness goes from being something that a person enjoys to being everything that he is. In a mature meritocracy, schools and jobs dominate elite life so immersively that they leave no self apart from status.

> In short, elites are shuttled into a life-long, endless competition that not only consumes their life quantitatively but qualitatively as well, leaving no room for self-expression, actualization, or discovery — only self-exploitation, value extraction, and endless anxiety.

[MattGaiser]

> even high-status, highly-paid careers are still built around 60+ hour work weeks for many.

An interesting article about that:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...

Also, anecdotally, my friends in the high powered law tracks all got there by spending their lives generating stuff for their resumes, so when they arrive, they compete the same way.