Exactly my point! When Econ 101 enters the room, humanity and morality are gone. reduced to mere numbers on a spreadsheet.
The fact that you try to explain away some of the worst examples of human greed as the companies simply following the market shows that in your head following the market trends absolves one of any moral wrongdoings. While in reality, the companies you so staunchly defend suffer from the problem that their executives can make bets on the future without bearing the responsibilities of being wrong. That's the problem of not having your skin in the game (same as the cause of the 2008 financial crisis).
- Overgrow? Stock goes up, cause we are growing.
- Layoffs? Stock goes up, because we are streamlining.
Nowhere in that cycle is the CEO held accountable or is the company inspected on actually being profitable or a bonus good for society.
> Who made them overhire?
Right, low interest and borrowing rates COULD be a great incentive if one wants to grow their company, but that's not an imperative, you don't NEED to do that. You can use the money for other things: as R&D or as part of a war chest, or simply raise the salaries of your workers (lol), or simply not borrow at all. You know one company that didn't overhire during the pandemic? Apple. Were they stupid? Did they not know about the wonders of economy 101? No. They simply were staffed enough, and knew there are other ways to bring shareholders ROI rather than growing like a bloated cancer.
You know why the rest overhired? Because there were no repercussions for their executives if their bet went wrong. Money was basically free, so why not? Econ 101 says it's the right thing to do in the pre-2023 market where value of the company was determined by potential of growth, and not as it should: by the simple formula of revenue - expenses = profits. If their bet was wrong (and it was very wrong), nothing could go wrong for them. Why not have 3 rounds of layoffs after the overhiring, it's not like the executives are ever held responsible, and it really can bump up the stock price and leverage better negotiation position with those pesky expensive developers. And that, my friend, is why you need unions and heavy governmental oversight, to counteract that Econ 101 means all humanity out of the window.
- Econ 101 would simply lead you to the conclusion that if your US workers are too expensive, the right thing to do is to replace them with cheaper overseas workers, UNLESS there is regulation or union stopping you to do so
- Econ 101 will lead you to the conclusion that when your offshore support team can be replaced with a chatbot, you'd throw them under the bus within a second.
- Econ 101 will lead you to the conclusion that overhiring to increase market value for shareholders is the right thing to do, despite you having no clear plan what to do with those workers, nor projects to put them on. "They'll figure out the details later, let's grow for now. Stonks go upp"
- And when the balloon pops, econ 101 will lead you to the conclusion that it's time to cancel the visas and destroy the livelihoods of the same people they hired a year ago.
All this in the chase of the dollar! It's disgusting.
That's why we need far bigger government control over these companies, and stronger, multinational unions than we have now. Recently I've been very happy with the unions in the nordics sticking it to Tesla: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-.... That's more of what we need to do, because it's better for us, the workers.
Otherwise, left on their own within the invisible hands of the free marker (what a load of crap, conjured by a mentally limited, jealous, angry and totally inhuman Scotsman, no wonder economists are psychos), the megacorps will race themselves to the bottom and drag us with them.