To some degree, older folks or folks with money are leaving the workforce and not reporting themselves as unemployed. Going part time or just closing down their career. This causes a mid to high end shortage which will indirectly drain lower level jobs as well.
It's bad because the overwhelming majority of people don't enjoy the process of finding a new job and cannot afford to spend time finding new work.
I think a lot of the talk is also due to unhappiness with the economic trend that is drawing the median and minimum incomes closer together, which is a reversal of a trend that gave widespread optimism and contentment.
There are two things here (1) A lot of people involuntarily dropped out of the workforce which not captured by simple unemployment rate (2) What's important is quality of jobs which is what you can buy with your income. We may have an abundance of food and LCD TVs at the moment -- goods that may have faced inflation before their production was less mechanized/automated but these efficiency gains have been more than eaten up by inflation in housing, education and healthcare which all are associated with competition for a scarce, less elastic, resource.
You would expect to see average wages decrease as companies hire less experienced, less productive workers who are just starting new jobs. So in a way it could be sort of a good sign since those workers wouldn't have found jobs at all when the economy was weaker, but it's hard to tell what's really going on based on that data.
(I agree the economy still isn't good for many people.)
On the good side, I was allowed to view this from the perspective of spreadsheets and board meetings and see the net gains. And also do follow-up analysis that showed the least product people retiring or moving to lower quality work while the most productive went on to do 10x better things.
The dark side isn't pretty. We still had to lay off tens of thousands, affecting hundreds of thousands indirectly localized to a handful of communities and cities. I've decimated neighborhoods before by the literal definition (10%+ move out to find work in other cities). And the data tells us that at least a couple of those people will die as a result of the layoffs at the 10K+ scale. Can't talk macro-productivity when that's happening. Too tone deaf.
I'm empathetic to people losing their jobs, but those people were given their jobs in anticipation of further growth. Labor is almost always the easiest cost to reduce, but the value a few thousand people bring to the economy themselves via wages is dwarfed by the excessive overvaluation the Meta bubble generated.
It’s also, quite frankly, the market reallocating economic decision making power. After a decade of beanstalk economics, it’s reassuring to see the system at least attempting to correct itself.
I have no sympathy for the people losing money. For the young people who invested precious years into what increasingly looks like an economically useless skill set, I feel badly. That said, those who picked up technical or sales chops can likely pivot to a position above the median American’s wages.
Unfortunately the people that are unemployed because of all this aren’t (in general) that important to the economy. This will only further push class disparity.
People can't buy better stuff because they don't have jobs or jobs that pay well enough. Those jobs leaving are what helps them buy the cheaper stuff. Quite the roundabout, isn't it?
Agree with all that. I disagree only that demand for labor has decreased, and near-full employment is my evidence for that. Many jobs are shitty, but someone is demanding the labor.
The young people I work with now are the laziest I've ever seen. I think the job market has been so strong for so long they dont know what the real world is like. If/when we get a proper recession these people will all start working properly or get fired.
The economy is doing fine for people whose income comes mostly from return on capital. It is not good for people whose income comes mostly from working.
It is almost laughable how soon people forget where they have been, how much national debt has has been piled to bring this meager growth in economy. The main reason the employers are hiring is the extension of temporary tax cuts. It is only a short term boost to the market for the time being.
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