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Comment by yasp | Hacker News Reader

> A more intriguing possibility concerns the labour force. According to our estimates the rich world is “missing” 10m workers, or roughly 1.5% of the total workforce, relative to pre-pandemic trends (see chart 3). In Britain and Italy the workforce has actually shrunk. Early retirements and an increasingly elderly population explain some of the deficit. Covid may have pushed people to reassess their priorities, prompting them to drop out. Some even speculate that long covid is forcing people to stay on the economic sidelines. Whatever the explanation, falling participation has wreaked havoc with companies’ plans. Many fired staff when the pandemic struck, only to struggle to rehire them in 2021. That year vacancies across the oecd hit an all-time high of 30m.

Why not ask them?

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There have been endless articles about:

  - how felony records, addiction to opiates, lack of citizenship paperwork, etc have made so many people undesirable hires
  - how so many people have moved onto disability insurance
  - how certain populations are opting to play video games, watch porn, and live at home with parents
  - young women were squeezed out of the workforce during the pandemic and have yet to return in large numbers
  - medical bankruptcy (a mostly US specific issue)
  - inefficiency in hiring funnels (“the resume firewall”)

We are asking them. We just don’t have solutions to help them re-engage. Many Western countries put too much onus on individual responsibility and don’t have a functional social system for optimizing retraining and unemployment-hiring matching.

Ask whom?

The missing 10m?

Might be hard. What with them being ‘missing’.

Ostensibly they are missing from the labor force, not from the planet.

How many are dead or permanently disabled because of Covid, I wonder.

COVID has killed hundreds of thousands, but overwhelmingly older or weaker folks, the kinds who are retired, semi-retired, or on disability. This would have had an impact, but not 10 million

Considering almost 7m people died from covid officially … Yeah they’re pretty missing

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

The Economist puts excess deaths at 20m

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

How many of these dead people were of a working age?

Enough?

Keep in mind we got some of the first ever basic human rights because there weren’t enough peasants after the black plague.

I mean in the context of does it explain the absent workers?

If you go with that excess deaths number, if the answer was 1/4 (which is what stats suggest) that covers half of the 10M.

There's still the other half, but that's not nothing.

I would think that the older folks that died from Covid had some money to leave to their children or grandchildren, who use that to either take an extended vacation, or sabbatical or whatever. Just because they are old and weren't working doesn't mean their early death didn't have a monetary affect.

So the trouble is, there's a lot more than 10m people outside the labor force of the relevant countries - that's true even if you only consider people who are actually in those countries, let alone the people who live in other countries who have not migrated there. The trick is figuring out which 10 million of those people are the ones who would have been participating in that labor force.

Will HR permit hiring someone who was downsized or it not currently working in that role with that job title? Its all about risk minimization, not workforce maximization.

Not really, going economically inactive is a rejection of the state of affairs.

But some patterns or modus operandi have been going on for thousands of years, albeit reacting more quickly now a days due to improved forms of communication.

>At airports people are employed to straighten suitcases after they tumble onto the baggage carousel.

People need to recognise slavery and not be treated like a dog.

The 1st world has its problems, but the planet has its problems, people need to look at things with a global perspective as well as a national perspective and read between the lines.

The days of a job for life are over, the days of working in one country all your life are over. The need to retrain and remain up to date is a form of cutting the fat, a variation of survival of the fittest, but still survival of the fittest.

Becoming cynical can be healthy a healthy attribute to have. The over aching desire to get people worshipping money couldnt be more on display that ever before.

https://www.scmp.com/business/economy/article/1524064/sex-an...

People need to make sure their lives are not stolen, because when you realise whats been done to you, its hard to recover from that. And as long as people continue to get away with stealing from others in legal ways, the fraud will continue.

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