Why Everyone Is Angry: A Data Dive Into the Broken Social Contract
What education, housing, healthcare and income data reveals about a society on edge
“Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Societies are built on an unspoken deal: in exchange for security and opportunity, we surrender certain freedoms and entrust the state with the authority to enforce justice. We agree to abstain from violence so long as we believe the system will take care of us—allowing only the government to wield force in the name of law and order.
But what happens when that deal breaks down? When the system no longer protects its most vulnerable?
The killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare Insurance, by alleged perpetrator Luigi Mangione, and the widespread public support for him have exposed the fragile consensus that holds this social contract together. This essay is the fourth in a series examining the killing. In previous parts, we examined how moralizing by both Luigi’s supporters and his critics was deepening our social divides, and that any serious reckoning must begin with a more objective framework to assess the situation.
Using John Rawls’s famous ‘Veil of Ignorance’ thought experiment, we concluded that a just and stable society must offer equal access to opportunity, regardless of race, class, nationality, religion, or the economic circumstances of one’s birth. We also established that a society that fails to meet this benchmark would inevitably collapse due to instability. In this piece, I apply Rawls’s lens to hard data across education, housing, healthcare, democracy, and more in the United States to see if it meets the bar for a just society.
The evidence shows that not only do we fall short of Rawls’ ideal—we are actively moving further away from it. Upward mobility has been replaced by downward pressure. Entire systems have turned into traps. While the essay focuses on U.S. data, because it is both abundant and illustrative, the logic of collapse is global. The same forces are at work elsewhere—sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but unmistakably present. From the UK to Canada, from Germany to India, cracks are appearing in the same pillars of opportunity.
The killing of Brian Thompson may seem like an isolated act—but the data shows that it is a symptom. A canary in the coal mine. If we don’t take corrective action soon, the unraveling of the social order may come faster than we think.
While the main focus of this essay is to establish the failure of the current system, I’ll also briefly explore examples of alternatives from around the world that show this trajectory is not inevitable. We can design fairer systems. But to do that, we first have to admit that there is a problem. With that, let’s begin our deep dive.
🎓Education: The Stolen Ladder
First up, let’s look at education. For decades, going to college was the clearest path for lower- and middle-class families to achieve upward mobility. However, once a great equalizer, higher education has now become a gatekeeper—offering opportunity only to those who can afford its rising costs.
Since 1970, the cost of attending a private, not-for-profit college in the U.S.—a category that includes institutions like Harvard and MIT—has increased thirtyfold. And that figure doesn’t even include the full cost of attendance. When you add in housing, food, and other expenses, the total comes to around $58,600 per year, or $234,400 for a four-year degree.
With the current median U.S. household income around $80,000 pre-tax (~$64,000 post-tax), how is a family supposed to afford that? For most families, the cost of sending one child to a top college is now equal to an entire year’s income. What if you have two children? Three?
No wonder student debt in the U.S. has ballooned to $1.73 trillion. Far from a launchpad to prosperity, college has become a financial trap that shackles millions for life.
And these numbers only reflect costs after high school. The real arms race begins much earlier: private prep schools, test tutoring, application consultants, extracurriculars tailored for admissions. These are costly privileges reserved for the wealthy—and they offer enormous advantages. Graduates from elite institutions not only land the highest-paying jobs, they also build networks that help them stay in power, entrenching inequality across generations.
In Rawlsian terms, this is a fundamental failure. A just society would ensure that your chance at success isn’t defined by the zip code you’re born into or your parents’ net worth. But in today’s America, a child from the top 1% is 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than a child from the bottom 20%. That’s not hyperbole—it’s a statistic from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The ladder of opportunity still exists, but is being pulled up. It now costs six figures, and only a select few are even allowed to touch it.
🏠 Housing: The New Feudalism
If education no longer lifts people out of poverty, housing—once the cornerstone of the middle-class dream—offers no better refuge. For most of the 20th century, homeownership was a symbol of security and a tangible step toward stability. Today, it’s increasingly a fantasy.
Since 2000, inflation-adjusted household incomes in the U.S. have risen just 4.5%, while home prices have soared by 59.1%. Those numbers alone suggest a troubling mismatch. But the real crisis emerges when you look at affordability.
A key metric is the house price-to-income ratio, which compares the cost of a median home to a median household’s annual income. A ratio of 3–4x is generally considered affordable. As of 2022, the U.S. average stood at 5.8x.
But even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Let’s run the actual numbers:
Median household income in 2022: $75,000 pre-tax, about $60,000 post-tax
Median household spends 30% of income on rent, saves less than 5%
Taken together, that 35% amounts to $26,250 per year to put toward a mortgage
The annual cost of owning the median home—including mortgage payments, taxes, and maintenance—is $43,200
That’s a shortfall of nearly $17,000 per year. In plain terms: it’s mathematically impossible for the average household to buy a home.
And it doesn’t stop there. The situation is far worse in major cities—Los Angeles clocks in at a house price to income ratio of 12.5x, meaning it would take over twelve years of full income for a typical household to afford a home. Running the ownership feasibility calculation for cities like LA is an altogether absurd task.
This isn’t just a spreadsheet problem. It’s a psychological and generational rupture. Young people are delaying moving out, postponing marriage, and giving up on starting families—not because they’re lazy or unambitious, but because the economic foundations of adult life have eroded beneath them. The social contract promised a future in exchange for hard work. That promise is now bankrupt.
No wonder so many people feel like serfs in a new kind of feudal system—renting indefinitely from landlords and corporate owners, unable to ever “own” anything of value.
And it’s not as if no alternatives exist. In Vienna, consistently ranked the most livable city in the world, over 60% of residents live in subsidized housing. Nearly half the housing market is made up of city-owned or cooperative apartments. That’s stability by design.
In contrast, America’s housing market increasingly serves financial institutions, not families. While private equity firms like Blackstone buy up homes, driving prices further out of reach, working-class people are left competing for scraps.
Rawls would fail this society. A just system would never allow something as fundamental as shelter to be distributed according to speculative capital and inherited advantage. But that’s exactly where we are.
🏥 Healthcare: Punished for Being Sick
If education has become a burden and housing a trap, then healthcare is the knife twisting in the wound.
Abhorrent as murder is, it is critical to understand that the widespread support for the killing of Brian Thompson isn’t happening in a vacuum. It is a sign of frustration with a healthcare system that no longer heals but cripples. In America today, half the population can’t afford a $500 emergency expense. That’s not just a health crisis—it’s an existential one.
More than 100 million Americans carry some form of medical debt, whether owed to institutions or borrowed from friends and family. That’s nearly one in three people, and the consequences go far beyond balance sheets. A recent survey found that 63% of these adults cut spending on food, clothing, or other essentials to pay off medical debt. These are the stark survival choices facing people in what’s supposed to be the richest country in the world.

And the burden falls hardest on those least able to bear it. According to a 2020 study by RAND Corporation, families in the bottom 20% of income spend 33.9% of their income on healthcare, while the wealthiest pay just 16%. When you’re poor, being sick doesn’t just cost more—it often costs everything.
Even worse, debt doesn’t just punish you for falling sick—it forecloses your future. Medical debt tanks your credit score, which in turn affects your ability to get a better-paying job. Shockingly, 16% of U.S. employers run credit checks on all applicants, and one-third run them on some. The credit check can lead to you being rejected from the very opportunities that would help you escape your debt—creating a loop that traps people indefinitely.
This isn’t hypothetical. A devastating NPR feature interviewed Americans drowning in medical debt. The quotes are haunting.
"My doctor saved my life, but my medical bills are stealing from my children’s lives."
"They took everything we had."
"It's like you're being punished for being sick."
"We didn’t have any hope left."
These aren’t outliers. They’re voices from a system that treats vulnerability as liability.
And once again, it doesn’t have to be this way. Public healthcare models around the world—such as the UK’s NHS—show that universal care is possible, even in capitalist democracies. Even in the U.S., Kaiser Permanente demonstrates that private-sector models can be aligned with patient outcomes when structured thoughtfully.
But under the current system, American healthcare is a paywall, not a safety net. And like housing and education, it violates the core principle that Rawls laid out: a just society would never let access to life itself depend on income level or birth circumstances.
Healthcare is where the betrayal of the social contract becomes most intimate. Because here, the cost of inequality is counted not in lost opportunities, but in lost lives.
🗳️ The Power Gap: When Wealth Buys Democracy
So far, we’ve seen how education, housing, and healthcare—once pillars of a fair society—have become mechanisms of exclusion. But perhaps even more corrosive is the growing sense that the system can’t be fixed, because those in power no longer represent the people.
Inequality is not just about money. It’s about who gets to decide the course of our lives. And increasingly, decisions about public life—about who leads, what laws pass, what futures get built are being shaped not by citizens, but by capital.
This transformation was supercharged in 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Citizens United ruling. The decision held that corporations and unions could spend unlimited money on campaigns, as long as the spending was technically ‘independent’ i.e. not directly contributing to the candidate’s campaign. The court argued that money is a form of speech, and that limiting political spending would violate free speech rights.
In practice, it opened the floodgates. The ruling allowed the creation of political action committees that can campaign on behalf of a candidate. These unregulated, unaccountable campaign machines can raise and spend billions, often without revealing their donors. A single billionaire can now fund an entire political movement. A fossil fuel company can quietly bankroll a climate-denying candidate. And none of us ever gets to vote on that.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s what the law allows. No wonder this verdict has often been cited as institutionalizing corruption.
The effect is to dilute the meaning of “one person, one vote” and replace it with something closer to “one dollar, one vote.” It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this erodes public faith in democracy itself.
Nowhere was this abuse of democracy more visible than in the most recent U.S. elections. Elon Musk spent over $260 million supporting Donald Trump. He also used Twitter, his private social media platform, to aggressively campaign for Trump. It is quite possible that if he had put the same weight behind Kamala Harris, the outcome of the election might have been completely different. Beyond the election, he has dismantled entire government departments as the head of the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency and influenced international policy. And none of this power was granted democratically.
Even beyond elections and government institutions, wealthy tech CEOs are wielding undue, undemocratic power over our lives. Decisions about artificial intelligence—a technology with the potential to reshape civilization or end it altogether—are being made without meaningful public oversight. The justification for it all? We, the good guys, have to do it, else China will beat us to it.
That rhetoric might have been believable if, in 2023, the board of OpenAI hadn’t tried to remove CEO Sam Altman over concerns about transparency and safety. In 2024, the entire safety team quit, citing an abandonment of critical guardrails. This is the lab developing what many believe could be the most powerful technology in human history. And yet, there is no treaty, no democratic mandate, no global framework. Just unbridled corporate interest.
Who gave these people the power to decide the future of humanity?
Rawls would be horrified. Even if material opportunity were equal, a just society would never concentrate this level of decision-making power in the hands of a few unelected, unaccountable actors.
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📉 The Widening Gap: When the System Breaks for Everyone
The data from education, housing, healthcare, and democracy paints a bleak enough picture. But there’s something deeper—and more dangerous—happening beneath the surface: the inequality isn’t just wide—it’s accelerating.
The graph below from Realtimeinequality.org shows real income trends in the U.S. from 1976 to today, broken down by income groups: the top 0.01%, 0.1%, 1%, 10%, the middle 40%, and the bottom 50%. The story it tells is worrisome.

Since the pandemic began, income for the top 0.01% has increased by 30%. For the bottom 50%, it has fallen by 14%. Even the middle 40%—America’s traditional middle class—has seen a 3% decline. The top is still rising. Everyone else is sliding backward.
These are not long-term shifts playing out quietly over generations. These are violent economic swings happening in real time, right now. Even keeping aside questions of fairness, this situation is downright unsustainable.
And these swings are not confined to one country. Across much of the developed world, real wages have stagnated while asset prices have soared, pushing millions into economic precarity. In the Global South, these pressures are intensified by debt burdens, climate shocks, and unequal access to global capital. What we are witnessing is not a local failure—it’s a planetary pattern. A 2022 Oxfam report found that during the pandemic, the world’s ten richest individuals doubled their net worth, while 90% of humanity became poorer.
Of course, inequality is not a new story. But what’s different now—and more volatile—is that for the first time in decades, even the upper-middle class (the top 10%) is starting to feel squeezed.
This group—highly educated, often with elite credentials—once benefited from the system’s upward flow. They weren’t part of the 1%, but they had just enough cushion to believe in the game. Now, with wages stagnating, housing out of reach, healthcare costs ballooning, and even their retirement insecure, they’re losing faith too.
Historically, this shift has been a political tipping point. When only the poor suffer, society absorbs the pressure. But when the upper tiers start to falter, revolutions brew. Think of pre-revolution France, where even the nobility was weighed down by financial strain, and resentment reached a critical mass.
We’re not there yet. But the parallels are growing louder.
And once hope fades—once people stop believing that hard work leads to progress—the system doesn’t bend. It breaks.
🏛️ The System Fights to Stay Broken
The numerous data points above show how the current system fails to provide equal opportunity. But how does that system persist—even as public trust erodes? Why does so little seem to change?
The answer lies in feedback loops that make the status quo difficult to dislodge.
Take corporate lobbying. In theory, it gives different sectors a voice in policymaking. In practice, it amplifies the voice of those with the most money.
Consider ExxonMobil. In the 1970s, its own scientists warned the company about climate change. But rather than act, the company funded misinformation campaigns to delay regulation. The playbook worked: real reform was stalled, profits preserved, and the public misled.
This isn’t an isolated case. Big Tobacco and Facebook are prominent examples of how powerful industries spend billions each year to shape legislation, water down reforms, and influence public narratives.
Again, alternatives exist to this model. In Sweden, for instance, political parties are heavily funded through public money, reducing their dependence on corporate donors. At the same time, unions have a strong influence on legislation, and corruption is kept in check through strong transparency laws.
But even if we fixed the broken lobbying system, malicious political capture isn’t the only thing propping up inequality. It’s also embedded in economic structures that quietly magnify it over time.
Economist Thomas Piketty described this with a simple equation:
r > g — the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth.
If you own assets—stocks, real estate, equity—your wealth compounds faster than the economy grows. If you don’t, you fall further behind.
In the U.S., the top 1% own 54% of all stocks. The bottom 50% owns just 1%. So when markets go up, the gains flow overwhelmingly to those already ahead. This means that inequality doesn’t just persist. It accelerates—on autopilot.
And it’s here—at the intersection of passive structural dynamics and active power defenses—that the real danger lies. Even well-meaning actors get trapped in a system that rewards inaction. If your influence, security, and identity all depend on things staying as they are, then pushing for change feels risky—no matter how necessary.
In this case, there’s no grand villain behind the curtain. Just the economic machine working as intended. In fact, it is this economic machine that provides incentives for the aforementioned lobbying as well. When markets reward short-term profit and the externalization of true costs, why would companies behave differently?
🔁 A Long Overdue Change
It’s tempting to respond to all of this with rage. Many already are. The rise of “eat the rich” rhetoric, the boiling resentment toward elites, and the surge in populist anger aren’t happening in a vacuum. They’re a reaction to a system that feels extractive, unresponsive, and rigged against the majority.
But anger alone won’t get us out of this. And neither will scapegoating. Blame, while emotionally satisfying, often misses the point.
Many honest rich people have worked hard for their wealth. The danger we face is structural. Left unchecked, inequality compounds. Trust erodes. Institutions fracture. Social contracts collapse—not just for the poor, but eventually for everyone.
That collapse doesn’t require villains. It only requires drift. Systems that reward accumulation without redistribution, protection without accountability, and decision-making without representation eventually reach a tipping point. They create outcomes that may feel "earned" from the inside, but look like theft from the outside. That’s where we are.
And so, responsibility now falls not only on those who’ve gamed the system, but also on those who’ve won by playing within its rules. If you’ve gained wealth, influence, or insulation from instability, then even if you didn’t cause this moment, you are now implicated in what happens next.
That doesn’t mean vilifying the rich. It means recognizing that those with leverage have the most capacity to lead the repair. This is not a moral indictment. It’s a pragmatic call.
Markets don’t self-correct for justice. Growth doesn’t trickle down. Without intentional reform, the system’s drift will continue—and soon destabilize even those who thought they were safe.
The case for change, then, is not based on justice alone. It’s strategic.
In the next essay, I’ll outline a values-based framework that offers both the haves and the have-nots a shared foundation for the necessary change—one rooted in long-term sustainability and interdependence.
For now, let’s return to the test that opened this essay: Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance.
If you were to be born tomorrow, without knowing your race, class, geography, or wealth—would you choose to be born into this system?
If the answer is no, then Luigi Mangione’s act is not just a crime. It is a warning. And the hour is late.
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I pretty much agree with everything you said. We see where this is going, it won't be long until the wheels fall off. My question is what comes next? A once in a lifetime opportunity to reshape the country is on the horizon, but only if we come together and make it happen.
Excellent snapshot using the data! A very good essay! If you want to engage in the debate around how to transform U.S. politics to restructure the political economy for the common good, send me a DM. Seeing the problem is a powerful step toward redesigning a better future!