The great resignation relaxation

July 24, 2022. Is America dying? I mean literally, dying. Are we short of workers needed to keep the economy, or aging population and our position in the world from a slow death?

Recently, I was thinking about how all the claims of "record heat or draught are overstated, just as using the fact that perhaps ten cities, counties, states or whatever geographic area you choose has "set a new record" for temperature, "proving" the presence and effects of "climate change" go unchecked. Have the people making these claims looked back more than fifty years? or further than their own cherry-picked data? Aren't records always going to be set, "made to be broken," somewhere at some time in the future? I'd be more impressed and concerned by evidence that a city had experienced its ten highest temperature records in the last twelve years of its 400-year existence, then by a single year's record, one based on a look back of less than one hundred years.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who earned her reputation as a Reagan speech writer more than forty years ago, and who has been drifting left and saying less of value since that time, recently caught up with the "great resignation" observers, and is offering up her own particular theory as to the initiation and duration of this twenty-first century American phenomenon.

Here is the article:

The ‘Great Resignation’ Started Long Ago - WSJ.pdf

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Adding her personal twist to a story that had only recently come to the forefront of political punditry, Noonan attempts to push the "start" of this "trend" back at least twenty years, and to offer a variety of potential or likely explanations. Some are based on research, e.g., the well-established decline in the workforce participation rate. Some are poor surrogates, e.g., "low" unemployment rates. Some are pundit worthy speculations about childcare costs, quality of life, demographics and other causes of the millions of Americans -- well, not all of them are Americans; some of them are immigrants in waiting, migrant workers, or other not-yet-fully "American" Americans -- who are either leaving the labor force or who are just sitting on the sidelines, having either never been in the labor force or who chose to "sit this one out" for the time being.

This harkens back to an earlier post on this phenomenon, which reminded me of how I noted to my students the tens of millions of adult or "working age" residents of Americans who are not working yet who are not considered "unemployed" because they are not seeking to find work. Leaving these people out of the unemployment count is misleading at best, often disingenuous, and potentially dangerous to any critical analysis of a labor force shortage. Add in the product of multiplying the work non-participation rate with American population growth and you find millions more non-participants even wren the participation rate to remain steady.

Bottom line for America is people need to work, for themselves their families and for their country. And this means work that "creates wealth," work that produces an income, an income that pays taxes, work that keeps people off the "dole," work that adds millions to the labor force participation numbers, work that grows more productive each year, work that informs college-bound students as to where their future careers and lives can take them, and work that gives meaning to people's lives, even if that "meaning" is simply knowing that the world is better off for you having done that work.

In response to the Noonan "analysis," as usual her column generated thousands of responses, most of them in disagreement with her thesis, and with better or at least more plausible explanations for this reduction in people working and the problem with filling jobs today. And it's not the Biden advice, i.e., "pay more!" nor is it the university president's advice, "Hire more liberal arts majors (and pay them more)! The best responses (see examples, below) basically note the unwillingness and the lack of necessity to work to provide a life in this country, an observation obvious when one looks at the number of people judged to be "working," i.e., about 160 million in 2023 (up from 144 million in 2013), as compared to the number of working-aged people in the United States not in that number, i.e., perhaps another hundred million. There are more disincentives to work than there are incentives for tens of millions of otherwise potentially productive, contributing American adults. Add in the young and the old, not of "working age," and you have 180 million people whose lives depend on the goods and services provided by those 160 million. And those 160 million also need goods and services, it's about 160 million supporting 340 million people, and that's not counting the millions of people outside the United States who are supported in some indirect or direct fashion by the labor of this living in America, about $70 billion of support annually to non-residents.

Underlying this economic iceberg is a cultural shift, namely the decline of the nuclear family, the eroding of the American higher education system, and the separation of the privileged, protected intelligentsia from the working classes. Without intact, "working" or "successful" families, without a "productive" higher education system, and without a reckoning of the intelligentsia with working reality, there will be great difficulty and little hope of serious, sustainable change for the better.