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Can the West’s perplexing employment miracle continue?
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Re: Can the West’s perplexing employment miracle continue?
#52> A more intriguing possibility concerns the labour force. According to our estimates the rich world is “missing” 10m workers, or roughly 1.5% of the total workforce, relative to pre-pandemic trends (see chart 3). In Britain and Italy the workforce has actually shrunk. Early retirements and an increasingly elderly population explain some of the deficit. Covid may have pushed people to reassess their priorities, promp…
Ask whom? The missing 10m? Might be hard. What with them being ‘missing’.
Not really, going economically inactive is a rejection of the state of affairs.
But some patterns or modus operandi have been going on for thousands of years, albeit reacting more quickly now a days due to improved forms of communication.
>At airports people are employed to straighten suitcases after they tumble onto the baggage carousel.
People need to recognise slavery and not be treated like a dog.
The 1st world has its problems, but the planet has its problems, people need to look at things with a global perspective as well as a national perspective and read between the lines.
The days of a job for life are over, the days of working in one country all your life are over. The need to retrain and remain up to date is a form of cutting the fat, a variation of survival of the fittest, but still survival of the fittest.
Becoming cynical can be healthy a healthy attribute to have. The over aching desire to get people worshipping money couldnt be more on display that ever before.
https://www.scmp.com/business/economy/article/1524064/sex-an...
People need to make sure their lives are not stolen, because when you realise whats been done to you, its hard to recover from that. And as long as people continue to get away with stealing from others in legal ways, the fraud will continue.
Re: Can the West’s perplexing employment miracle continue?
#53Rates are still well below what we had leading up to the dotcom bust. And corporate leverage is still conservative. It’s a very similar backdrop with AI leading the narrative this time around.
Re: Can the West’s perplexing employment miracle continue?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I trust the ECB to miss their targets. It is part of the job description setup. You are trying to control a chaotic system with one knob and you have to follow a manual that gets rewritten with past learnings: a) if the issue reoccurs, the learnings are ineffective b) if the issue is new, how can you tell how to move the knob without pissing a lot of people and losing your job. It is a lose-lose game.
They have two knobs, setting interest rates and their balance sheet
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/art01_eb201504.en.pd
The balance sheet is used to direct effective interest rates intramarket -- not a separate knob.
Re: Can the West’s perplexing employment miracle continue?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't a high interest rate ecconomy, this is normal interest rates. Rates have been absurdily low for a while so you may not remember it, but history provides a record.
Historians in 500 years will stare in wonder at the stunning evidence we did not, in fact, build ALL the infrastructure, physical and otherwise, during the last ~25 years of absurdly cheap money.
The Historians will Honk the Toots in Urbit, praise artificial scarcity, amen.
Re: Can the West’s perplexing employment miracle continue?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't really “run through it” since the money is still there (unless the central bank pulls it out). But you are right that eventually the economy would grow enough to “soak up” the extra money and it wouldnt be so inflationary.
You run through it by having it move to the top, where it sits. $100 in the bank account of someone who only has $200 will be far more active in the economy than someone who has $2,000,000. Or $2B.
Unless you're putting money under a mattress, money in the bank or investments still circulates and creates inflationary pressures.
Re: Can the West’s perplexing employment miracle continue?
#57I thought this was a bizarre (OK, I'll be honest, shitty) article. The beginning starts out by seemingly making the point that Japan has low unemployment because it has a lot of inefficient, "make-work" jobs, e.g. "smartly dressed women help you use the lifts" (subtext being who needs help using an elevator) and "a team of four people was involved in the preparation of your correspondent’s gin martini".
OK, fair enough. But then it starts making the argument that employment in the West is going to look more like Japan. Except places where I'm aware where there are acute labor shortages (e.g. businesses like restaurants, child care, nursing, home services like plumber, electrician, etc.) look nothing like the picture the author tried to paint with his Japan vignettes. I.e. there aren't tons of spare waiters standing around waiting to make your drink where I live. More like you're happy just to get seated in the first place because places are so understaffed.
The current and coming labor shortages in the West are not a surprise - it's simple demographics, with nearly every 1st world country having a fertility rate that is well below replacement level. I think the pandemic did cause some folks to re-evaluate their priorities, but I think even there a lot of explanations are given for people "re-evaluating their priorities", but the reality is that labor shortages are causing some people to leave the workforce because the value of their "labor at home" is now relatively much more. For example, childcare in the US in many urban areas is extremely expensive. It's expensive to the point where if one member of a couple has a relatively low earning potential, it makes more sense for them to stay at home to raise their kids, rather than putting them in childcare, because the economics of it are no longer that favorable.
Re: Can the West’s perplexing employment miracle continue?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only it's not high compared to historical rates but worse I think is that Fed's real interest rate is still in the negative territory: January CPI report headline came at 6.3% YoY and core at 5.3% YoY (it's negative with current rates even if you use the PCE index as a baseline, which is the Fed's favorite index to measure inflation).
seems the consensus is "a little more inflation" is better than "a bigger recession" which is probably true. People are still trying to get on their feet, and inflation is "felt" a lot less than losing your job (and not being able to find a new one for a long time).
This conversation needs someone fiddling in the background.
No one had a normal economic life for several years. It’s a miracle that these levers have been adjusted to the point that everyone is like “well no one going to work for three years had no impact! What over-reactionaries!”
Re: Can the West’s perplexing employment miracle continue?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
seems the consensus is "a little more inflation" is better than "a bigger recession" which is probably true. People are still trying to get on their feet, and inflation is "felt" a lot less than losing your job (and not being able to find a new one for a long time).
Not sure whose consensus that is, but I don’t think it’s central bankers’. Their ability to fight inflation is tied up in market participants believing they will do what it takes to do so even in the face of harsh costs. If that reputation comes into doubt, we could end up with the worst of both worlds.
Maybe, but it seems to be what most investing-minded people seem to be ok with. I'm just a guy on the internet sharing my thoughts, btw.
Re: Can the West’s perplexing employment miracle continue?
#60My theory is that bullshit jobs are one of the mechanisms by which large corporations maintain a protective anti-competitive moat around their businesses; instead of letting unused labor roam freely in the markets to potentially compete against their interests, corporations provide as many jobs as required in order to keep as many people's time fully occupied in order to minimize the number of people who can compete…
I think this theory may also explain why larger companies often appear to hold people down instead of trying to grow them. Beyond a certain threshold of monopolization, the primary role of the mega-corporation may be to deplete talent (e.g. employee burnout, disillusionment, overspecialization in proprietary tools and processes leading to a career dead end) in order to neutralize its future competitive potential, more so than to leverage its immediate productive potential for their own immediate use.