Me too but - remember the jobless recovery from the early 1990's? This time around feels a lot more like it did then. Corporate profits are soaring, Wall Street is happy - there's lots of money being made. Except employees have been left out of the party and are on the outside looking in. This feels very much like that. Then again, that era presided one of the largest periods of economic growth in US history! If history repeats itself then we're all going to be in for a great time in about five years! Of course, that may be of little help to you if in the meanwhile you've depleted your life savings and have been foreclosed on.
Media can't gamify the facts: corporate profits are soaring and the stock indices have been doing great. GDP is up, US-based manufacturing is up, and job growth is at the highest levels in the modern era. The fact that's not helping the guy out on Main Street much is exactly what we saw in the early 90's.
The one thing I would say is different between now and the early 90's is we have a lot more retirees, and retirees as a group are much more exposed to inflation. Though its largely the Boomers who are that group of retirees and they've been through periods of much higher inflation and so if they thought Quantitative Easing was going to last forever then they were just being foolish.
They're also the generation rapidly losing power and so they like to complain so they can still feel like they have some power. If anything, because of the Boomers I'd say the media is being overly pessimistic about our current situation. It's still better than where we were in the early 90's.
Honestly, the best electives I took in college was microeconomics, macroeconomics, political science, and world history. After those four courses the world made a thousand times more sense to me. It's a shame these courses were electives and I didn't even have to take them, they simply fulfilled an elective requirement. It just seemed to me that if I were to regard myself as having a "well-rounded" education then I should know these things. BTW - I was a lot older when I went to college, I was something like 25 or 26 when I started and had already worked for two startups and had even lived and worked abroad. I had a lot of experience coming into college and so I was very mindful of my electives. My 18 year old self would have never made such smart choices.
These cuts are stock boosts and a result of lending rates rises coming from fed inflation response.
The fed even.reported theyd want unemployment to rise to help.
The inflation itself is driven by corporate price gouging, so its mostly rich people fighting eachother and seeing which part.of the proletariat is easiest.to downsize.
> We also have AI based efficiency boosting tools and greater offshoring to contend with
I think that AI is parroted around but there is little to no substance to the claims.
Some activities can and will be impacted by generative AI, but if you are not a copywriter or a graphics artist then your work is not significantly impacted by the current blend of commercial AI services.
Software engineering is a particularly popular target for these baseless claims, as if the critical path of each coding task is writing code. It isn't. In fact, I'm yet to see a single concrete claim on how generative AI impacts productivity beyond filling in boilerplate code and acting as a glorified template engine, and this assumes AI produces code that work which more often than not fails to do.
More importantly, implementing business services to automate business processes has a more direct impact on eliminating jobs. Things like opening an online store instead a brick and mortar shop eliminates the need for a bunch of positions. Nothing AI does comes even close to have that impact. But we still have brick and mortar shops.
It's also important to note that some software engineering positions didn't even existed a couple of decades ago, and they are high paying jobs. A couple of decades ago mobile development wasn't even a field, and right now it's absolutely clear that iOS developer and Android developer are entirely separate specializations.
I think it's possible that the increased efficiency of the employee due to generative AI leads towards cuts short term but growth long term as companies become increasingly competitive with each other due to a more leveled playing field.
People are complaining about "high inflation" and I'm thinking today inflation is finally back to normal. I was around in the 70's. Back then people would have considered the inflation we have today as an answer to their prayers!
The rate of change is much more important than the absolute inflation number in terms of how it effects workers and the economy. It's the rate of change in the inflation number that causes pain, more than the absolute percentage.
There's nothing scientific about the Fed or other central banks targeting for 2% versus, say 5% or 10%. A finance minister in New Zealand suggested the 2% target in the 80's:
https://www.cfr.org/blog/history-and-future-federal-reserves.... Other central banks copied it and now it's set in stone.
What matters is that everyone has an agreed upon expectation for what inflation will be. This is because the economy is based on expectations. Things only get bad when inflation moves suddenly higher or lower and it catches everyone off guard. All their annual projections are wrong and they have to make adjustments.
So the absolute inflation number doesn't really matter, so long as it is steady and predictable. It is true though, that psychologically the higher number may have a negative effect on people.
The 70's and 80's did have big inflation numbers, but what really causes the pain is the fluctuations. And in hindsight it's clear that the actual inflation number wasn't the problem, it was that no one knew what next years inflation rate would be.
The point is: on an absolute basis, today's inflation rates are lower. But that's not what we should be paying so much attention to. It's the rate of change of inflation that matters.
Moving from 2% to 8%, is effectively a 4x adjustment in expectations. Whereas going from 10% to 20% is just a 2x adjustment.
Yes, there's a part of me that thinks "you think these times are bad? They're not so much, you just weren't around when things were really bad, so you have nothing to compare to."
But I temper that with the understanding that people only really know what they've experienced. If today is the worst you've seen, then to you it's legitimately horrific. That's real.
That the situation today is downright luxurious compared to actual hard times isn't really emotionally relevant if you weren't around for the hard times.
The same articles were written each time. Once growth starts up again things will be the same.