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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

>Currently, the data suggest that reduced labor supply is likely the key driver

It's interesting as far as people I know looking for jobs, they're supply ... and having a hard time finding jobs. Reduced supply you'd hope you'd get a job.

Granted the article addresses this both in the types of jobs and:

>The stability of the unemployment rate masks effects of the low-hiring, low-firing labor market.

I do wonder, if this continues and a sense of economic slowdown or worse continues, would lowering a rate really fire up hiring? I know small businesses who can't eat /dance around tariffs like big companies, some are seriously terrified / facing hard decisions, others fine.

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My read on this is most jobs growth in raw numbers occurs in the lower pay brackets. In those pay brackets supply has decreased and the people doing the hiring have not raised wages. This means these jobs aren't being filled and the work isn't getting done. This leads to lower jobs numbers and keeps unemployment rates stable.

Yeah, anecdotally no one I know exemplifies that finding. Everyone who had had to job search ran into a ton of competition and either beat them all out or is under-/unemployed currently. Only way I could see the finding of reduced labor supply is that no one can afford to work in the low wage jobs that are open.

I can see one way in which it could be true that the labor supply is reduced, in specific sectors:

The ICE crackdowns are both directly removing large numbers of nonwhite people from the labor pool, and indirectly scaring much larger numbers of them away from it, lest they be the next ones sent to the camps.

Aside from that, though? No, I think talking about reduced labor supply is anti-labor propaganda at best.

Reduced demand in tech due to constraints of capital, and increased demand in agricultural and low wage jobs where immigrant labor was significant.

But funny enough, we can't just ship 100k software developers from the bay to the central valley and it just work.

That’s basically the plot of Stardew Valley. Programmers yearn for the fields.

I don't think Stardew Valley prepares you for the sweltering heat of performing manual labor in the Central Valley.

Save us Yoba!

> just ship 100k software developers from the bay to the central valley and it just work

But you could pitch a startup idea to replace those workers with agricultural robotics and collect some of that sweet AI venture capital!

Do you have any idea of how much money has gone into this already? Agriculture is an awful job. It's at the top of the list of jobs we would love to completely automate.

It turns out it's a hard problem because computer vision is hard, and we've had a lot of agtech investment already.

>Reduced demand in tech due to constraints of capital

That's it, really. All the "hiring" money is being spent on building data centers, at least in the US tech field. Better hope AGI is really around the corner, or that's a lot of money chasing nothing that could have been put to productive use.

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