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Comment by hnbad | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that the article is quick to blame "increased labor costs" and low unemployment (???) for the price hikes but then doesn't explain why prices for some items actually went down again. Meanwhile overall wages don't seem to track inflation.

It reads like some businesses had to increase wages to retain employees but this doesn't seem to be causative as these employees were asking for higher wages because of the increased cost of living, not the other way around.

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It’s so weird to me that the labor story seems to leave out that 1m people died in the pandemic and also the largest generation in history is retiring.

The people who died would have mostly been retired or lower productivity. Shouldnt impact labor costs much. Age pyramid definitely would though.

> Johnson took excess deaths and COVID deaths by age and applied labor force participation rates by age. And he got 300,000 workers who died as a result of COVID. Add that to the long-haul workers, and we’ve lost 1.9 million workers — or 18% of currently unfilled jobs.

Note: most of those long-haulers have recovered, but I suspect that a great many of those didn’t recover back to their original job. That means during the time they were disabled, they had to be replaced, possibly at a higher wage.

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/24/how-much-labor-force-...

I am pretty dubious of this based on the age distribution of deaths (most were over 65 and 50-65 is the only bracket with large numbers who werent below retirement age--average is 61) but thank you for providing a counter argument with data.

Long COVID would, though. And if people who would mostly have been retired or lower productivity are more likely to die and children don't contribute to the labor force in most of the US, long COVID would affect working age people primarily, no?

1m is worldwide right? I see excess deaths for US for the entire pandemic is around 470k. The US population grew 1.5 million just from July '22 to July '23. This is apparently above trend. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/19/texas-2023-populatio... Ref: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

I think it was over a million just in the US just based on reported cause on death certificates.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm

I'm going to guess you didn't read your own sources

> The raw death count gives us a sense of scale: for example, the US suffered roughly 470,000 excess deaths in 2020, compared to 352,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that year.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home

Total Deaths 1,159,864

That roughly tracks.

However that two years of excess mortality is still less than one year of population growth. How do you answer that

Babies don't work in grocery stores.

Not with that attitude

Excess deaths.

How is that relevant to how many people died of covid? We have pretty clear metrics of that, 1.1m. Excess deaths counts covid plus adjacent deaths due to avoiding care, poorer care delivery, and other confounding factors, as well as reduction in deaths due to less driving, risk taking, etc. We typically use excess deaths to measure in countries that were unable or unwilling to actually accurately report their death counts.

> 1m is worldwide right?

This statement is at such odds from reality it actually makes me curious. You are off by a factor of 20x. Do you think that you are knowledgeable about the events of the pandemic? How did you get your news about it?

Its made all the more puzzling by the fact that your own source has the correct figures.

I was under the assumption that the majority of people dying were at the 50+ age range. So not as many people that were employed.

Outside of software developers (more specifically, software developers in the Bay Area), most people work waaaaay past 50. At least 10 more years, and more than a few are probably going 15-20.

> It's interesting that the article is quick to blame "increased labor costs" and low unemployment (???) but then doesn't explain why prices for some items actually went down again.

I don't really have a strong opinion on the veracity, but I think the guy being interviewed is trying to provide an explanation for why restaurants specifically have 4x more MoM inflation than groceries. I don't think he's making an overall claim about the cause of recent inflation.

As far as the relationship between increased labor costs and low unemployment, lower unemployment gives workers more opportunities to vote with their feet and gives unionized workers more bargaining power.

> It reads like some businesses had to increase wages to retain employees but this doesn't seem to be causative as these employees were asking for higher wages because of the increased cost of living, not the other way around.

This is backwards. No business increases wages because employees ask for it. Employees always ask for higher wages. Wages go up when you can't find workers for lower wages.

Just because someone writes an article and cites increased labor costs, doesn't make it true.

There are a lot of other factors that are driving prices.

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