~400k documented/authorized workers leave the US labor market through death (55+) or retirement (Boomers, ~4M/year still retiring) every month. Immigration is down, and net migration was likely close to zero or negative in 2025. Unemployment is relatively low, but there is robust evidence of widespread underemployment and it taking 6-12 months for the unemployed to find jobs. My analysis is that companies are reaching for historical ZIRP era returns in a macro with higher rates (which will likely remain higher with the neutral rate closer to 2.5-3%) through "cost efficiency" whenever possible, by offshoring, nearshoring, and avoiding hiring as long as their systems and processes continue to function "good enough."
Deportations have pushed wages up in some examples (Texas healthcare industry) due to employers having to hire authorized workers to replace undocumented workers who would work for lower wages, but I have not seen broad data on this topic, citations welcome.
The economic metrics are masking a brutal worker economy, being held up by labor shortages (but shortages not yet sufficient to improve labor power), AI capital investment, and healthcare jobs (which will remain durable and in demand due to a rapidly aging US population) is my thesis.
Deportations are down from my understanding. Most people think deportations are up due to the “shock and awe” ice operations. The current administration, as with prior administrations, has no intentions of actually reducing the amount of cheap labor whether they are undocumented or not.
The main impact is from fewer workers entering the country clandestinely from Mexico due to the current administration’s enforcement of the border and the general impression of immigrants being treated poorly by administration. Illegal border crossings are now at a 50 year low.
> but there is robust evidence of widespread underemployment and it taking 6-12 months for the unemployed to find jobs
A really ignored aspect of this is that gig work is pretty prevalent once someone loses a stable job. This masks the unemployment with underemployment. There were headlines a while back about booming small business registrations as a sign of a booming economy. Turns out it was just a bunch of people registering businesses so that they can DoorDash
Culper Research had a thesis that a material amount of DoorDash gig workers were undocumented, I'm unsure how it panned out. I agree gig work platforms are a contributing factor to masking economy health indicators as well as underemployment.
because the jobs they do enable a lot of BS jobs, go
unfilled and actually need to be filled to create other
job growth while someone in the labor market for a long
time is likely in a comfortable job that will be
realized to be unnecessary and already replaced by
disruption from newer lower pay equivalents.
(Also GDP is in USD which means it is down 30% in many senses.)
> I don't really think retiring boomers play the same role in the economy.
~3M+ deaths during the pandemic pulled forward a labor supply shock that would've happened more slowly over time, due to structural demographics ("Demographics are destiny", fertility rates never recovered after the 2008 GFC in the US [economic shocks destroy fertility rates], population has been held up with net immigration for the last half decade). Boomers have investments and real estate equity in some cases, Medicare and Social Security in others (with some overlap), and have constant demand for healthcare and other elderly goods and services. They make up almost 20% of the population.
Certainly, there is a bifurcation between undocumented worker jobs (agriculture, high physical labor healthcare, food industry) and documented worker jobs Boomers are retiring from. The latter is relevant for my points on labor market dynamics, the former is distinct because it is unlikely documented workers are going to flow into these low wage, low quality of life jobs without higher wages and worker protections (as one would expect). You see this with employers and farmers complaining there are no workers for them.
The data shows older workers are absolutely playing a material part in the economy, both as consumers and workers.
> There are now 20 million more 55+ employed than there were in 2000. The 55+ population increased by 42 million (from 57 million in 2000 to 99 million today [2022]), a 74% increase. Total employment in the age cohort increased by 113%.
This data supports my viewpoint just as well. Older workers are taking
the lower effort higher reward jobs that Americans are healthy enough and happy enough to do. If we go by salaries a bunch of CEOs retiring would be
a massive blow to salaries and propping up the US economy. CEO
are paid by what the best CEO is worth as no one wants to believe they
hire dud CEOs.
There's no explanation to me as to why this years attrition from the labor
force is much more meaningful than any other years, but there is a
notable loss instead of gain of millions of workers willing and
able to do any job instead of any convenient job.
Do sardines cause sharks or do sharks cause sardines? In what
sense is the preference for the theory that sardines growth causes
shark population growth a lump of labor fallacy?
As a German I have to admit we are culturally odd with this. Our houses are way too over constructed and the dry-wall stigma here is just one aspect of it, wood construction stigma is another. It thus is no wonder that Americans have way more affordable housing.
Those stigmas are also odd for most of our heritage-like old towns that are full of still-intact "Fachwerk"-Wooden-Constructions - which basically use the same technique, should give us a hint or two. Also wooden constructions do allow to comply with our ever climbing ecology standards, without complicated venting mechanisms to keep mold out (as you need for stone). Those two stigmas are also odd, given, that drywall and wooden construction sectors are actually huge in Germany. Knauf is one of the worlds largest companies in the wallboard sector.
They're not. The long-term reduction in maintenance costs more than make up for it. Tell a German that the "normal" North-American "common sense" is saving 1-2% of the house value every year for repairs and you'll be considered a madman.
> and the dry-wall stigma here is just one aspect of it, wood construction stigma is another
Wooden structures allow for a lot cheaper adjustment later on (you usually have a few beams that are structurally important, often its just the outer walls that bear the load). If you try that with stone you can start with hiring an expert upfront or your house collapses.
Same goes energy efficiency. The isolation needs require thick plastic-covers on the outside (for stone), which are prone to mold, birds nests and lead to moss. Every residential stone building in Germany that is older than 10yrs provides you with a prime view through its plaster of where its plastic blocks are assembled, because of the moss. If you don't then they already paid the extra cost of recoating.
Every mortgage issuer will calculate 2-4% extra repair costs for the exterior alone. And we'Re not even talking about the venting, which officially requires a replacement and cleansing every 2-3 years, but of course nobody ever does it.
I could go on for hours about our German stonerism, but will end with the most funny thing, which is that most "stoners" are adamant about longevity vis-a-vis wood, pay extra for the stone, have to wait 3-5 times as long before they can actually move in (drying of mortar and screed can take up to year here in Germany) – but then the most important thing for longevity, the roof, will be made of wood ;-)
Saving 1% of your home value for repairs is actually the guideline set by the Dutch government. For HOAs there is even a legal mandate that they must set aside 0.5% of the rebuild value every year, but most decide on 1% to 2%.
Stein auf Stein, Brick on Brick. It's what makes the German feel safe. It will last forever. I will break everything but the walls if I hit them. I need heavy machinery to put a screw into the wall. It feels right for the German. Wooden houses are for eccentric people with too much money for a disposable house.
As much as I don't want to be a stereotypical German thick walls feel right to me. But I honestly don't think that our building style is the true one. It is just what I am used to.
The materials used in US house construction are practically restricted by a requirement to survive extreme seismic and wind loading. In the US there are ghost towns where brick and masonry cities were completely obliterated by these hazards. As the US learned how to engineer buildings that mitigated these risks, these learnings were reflected in construction standards.
This led to the highly evolved wood-frame and steel-frame structures used in all construction in the US you see today. There are still a few old brick and masonry buildings from before these building codes, but most of the buildings from those eras collapsed in one disaster or another.
So to plant a row of trees a bulldozer has to level sand dunes. I somehow doubt the exhaust from this process is factored into the CO2 sink calculation.
> Of course, we know that fuel consumption varies drastically from machine to machine, so we’ve looked at an example of a very high utilisation rate too. We found that an 8T excavator that spent 11 hours and 3 minutes working, 1 hour and 6 minutes of which were idle, it used 89 litres of fuel and resulted in 237.4kgs of carbon emissions. 4 hours saved on that machine would be a total of 84kgs of carbon emissions on average.
> To determine the amount of carbon dioxide a tree can absorb, we combine average planting densities with a conservative estimate of carbon per hectare to estimate that the average tree absorbs an average of 10 kilograms, or 22 pounds, of carbon dioxide per year for the first 20 years.
As long as they're not taking all day for one tree, I think they'll be OK.
That tree carbon capture estimate is probably conservative here if planting trees achieved de-desertification and resulted a larger thriving ecosystem.
The whole Epstein-Saga from the victims, the scale of operations, to the sheer range of people he connected from Gates, to Bannon to German Newspaper Editor-In-Chiefs, makes Berlusconis Bunga Bunga parties seem wholesome and decent.
Or it could be just the good old cyclical stock market correction after years of entire segments of the indecies growth being purely driven by software.
Of course such an angle would require much more research on behalf of the journalists for much less spotlight than what you would get for free by just singing to the tune of AI-doomerism.
I like that the pictures are taken by government employees instead of the graffiti writers themselves nor by fans of graffiti.
Because of that the pictured artworks look much less nice, and the images can capture what 99% of the artworks actually provide to their surroundings: dismay, disregard, and a constant reminder that urban anonymity is a moloch that you can enjoy watching from a coffee shop’s window, while it pisses in a baby stroller.
Exactly. These numbers don’t seem that impossible if one considers that the state‘s force rests upon (enough) ideological support within society. Given that, the distribution of regime supporters will be rather even across the country, and therefore sending in death squads wont mean bussing them in from Teheran but rather sourcing them locally.
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