Job growth has slowed sharply; the question is why

Have I?

The idea of deglobalization has been a rallying cry of both the left and the right. If you don't believe me, review someone like Bernie Sanders' beliefs (e.g. https://slate.com/business/2016/06/bernie-sanders-take-on-gl...)

What I further said is that even if deglobalization is a great idea (it isn't) then the execution we're seeing now by the right is very poor. We do not know how the left would have executed because the deglobalists in the Democratic Party do not have sufficient power.

Some quotes[1] just for fun:

Bernie Sanders: “increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite, is failing people everywhere.”

JD Vance: “the effects of globalization have hollowed out America’s industrial core.”

Trump: “Globalization has made the financial elites who donate to politicians very wealthy, but it’s left millions and millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache—and our towns and cities with empty factories and plants.”

And if you think these 3 represent fringes on the left and the right, you will be wrong. During the Biden admin, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai assert that governments’ urge “to liberalize as much as possible” has led to a “race to the bottom.”

[1] https://www.cato.org/free-society/summer-2024/globalization-...

Each year, a business needs to grow faster than it did the previous year.

If business owners get wealthy more rapidly than workers, then eventually the business will not be able to maintain increasing rates of growth, as its profit velocity exceeds the wage velocity of households. Think of a car fuel pump: you can accelerate all you want, at least your until the engine explodes, but if your fuel pump can’t pump more than 50mph of fuel, uour acceleration will crater into the negative and then flatline at 50mph when you hit that threshold — unless your efficiency gearbox has another upshift in it.

The only solutions that maintains profit growth velocity in that scenario is for the business to decrease wage velocity relative to profits velocity, and to decrease labor dollars per product. Namely, wage stagnation (which leads to wealth inequity), enshittification (which reduces customer brand investment), and layoffs (which decreases customer spending).

If, instead, businesses ensured that wage velocity matched profit velocity, then households wouldn’t have increasing wealth inequity and would be able to continue funding the growth velocity through spending. Businesses are prohibited from this by their fiduciary duty to shareholders.

AI is a last ditch attempt to discard 95% of the human creative labor force in all industries rather than face the rapid deceleration of profit growth going negative market-wide as household spending power (after inflation) continues to decrease. If AI succeeds, the eventual crash of growth velocity is delayed a few years until AI saturates the market. If AI fails, the market crashes, as investors can no longer expect positive growth acceleration from the market as a whole.

For any economic system where business profit growth acceleration exceeds wage growth acceleration, the eventual collapse of business is assured unless a miracle of productivity delays it. That’s why AI workers can get paid a quarter billion dollars: pocket change, compared to the wage inequality reckoning. That’s also why economists can’t explain inflation: they’re not yet willing to confront profit growth vs wage growth acceleration inequity as a primary cause of inflation.

Job growth has decelerated rapidly because otherwise profit growth decelerates rapidly. If this seems like killing the golden goose, that feeling typically correlates with a lack of faith in AI providing the necessary efficiency factor to permit sustaining profit growth after the one-time, profit-accelerating, inflation-spiking layoffs.

This begs the question of how many rich people there actually are, though.