Unprecedented 'Jobless Boom' Tests Limits of US Economic Expansion
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
We'll gain so much efficiency that the economy will evaporate.
The markets can't survive on capital alone.
LOL. Like a diet focusing on a single macro. When all that is left is capital, then that is an unhealthy diet.
It could be possible to have high GDP with low paychecks… it basically means the entire economy mostly consists of the wealthy few buying and selling things to each other. It is easy to see how that could happen if more things become automated.
You could imagine a world where there are only two people who own anything, and the entire economic productivity is generated by robots owned by those two people creating things and selling them to the other person, who uses those things for their robots to work with. You could produce tons and tons of things with no workers, and the GDP would keep growing.
Of course, the high GDP doesn’t mean everyone is fed and sheltered. Having a functioning and growing economic market is required for capitalism to serve its purpose of providing for the citizens, but it isn’t the ONLY requirement. If the form capitalism takes as we move into the future is one that stops providing for enough of its citizens, it won’t be able to sustain itself. I think there are things we can do to shift our capitalism to do a better job of providing for everyone, but there are a lot of forces fighting against that.
A similar thing happens when people talk about "total debt" in an economy. I like to bring up the scenario of 3 people trading a shiny rock around in a circle. Each time seller doubles the price and agrees to defer payment.
In this way, three kids can spend recess at school running the nation's average household debt to near-infinity! There are a few flavors of GDP calculation, but I expect it could yield some similarly odd results.
In both cases, the map is not the territory, and the metric is indirect/imperfect.
Pretty decent sci-fi, just pretend he didn't write any sequels tho.
A system of only two parties trading the entire economic output of a country would be utterly un-capitalist, more like two kings trading in products of their kingdoms. No doubt that any social institutes would have been subjugated by these two parties.
I want to highlight that the freedom of the efficient market is not the same as the freedom of participants, and that in certain specific ways they are inherently opposed.
Contrast these two kinds of promotion:
1. "Our X system is the most efficient and our best chance for abundance, we proved it with math! ... Because "correct" prices are discovered through public prices where all transactions are open market transactions with public prices. I
2. "Our X system is the free-est because nobody's telling you what to do with your stuff! Economic liberty! ... Because two consenting parties can make all sort of private deals with secret or preferential prices and and non-disclosure agreements.
I feel there are certain blocs--sometimes certain individuals--that act as if both are equally and simultaneously true, despite the inherent contradiction.
Or, if that doesn't work (because the robots are too dumb), you can at least split off the economy into a "poor" and a "rich" part that are mostly disconnected from each other.
What if the 99% of 'poor', create their own economy, own currency, start opening shops, small factories, etc...
Could we have an entire society without the rich? Reboot an an actual economy based on real goods?
Including the security roles that ensure the unemployed workers don't forcefully express their dismay at being redundant.
I think it's very possible some of these folks have convinced themselves otherwise, and have largely eliminated the folks who'd say "you fucking idiot, no" from their lives over the decades.
I joked with my manager when we were having a conversation about everyone being asked to use more AI, as an obvious precursor to keeping fewer employees to do the same amount of work: the end state of AI will be an AI manager having career conversations with the AI employee, discussing raises and bonuses.
I'm sorry, but vomiting up another bulleted list is NOT management. Its giving orders and then culling the % that don't comply. Wildly different things.
Which is why it’s surprising that management is salivating at the idea of replacing employees and expecting 1 employee to do the work of 10 with the help of AI agents. If the value you bring is to manage people, you shouldn’t be happy at the idea of fewer people having jobs.
How many human managers actually do that, though? How many websites performed satisfactorily before AI arrived? How well has technology matched what consumers really need or want? Maybe, as a society we have underperformed and nescient AI performs well enough (or even better) in comparison.
I’m suspecting something like Soylent Green, but perhaps with more proactive action taken to free up resources by removal of masses who are no longer producing enough value to justify their expenses.
Following up, I believe eventually it will all be replaced by something much more resembling feudal power. Where bound servants provide service labor in exchange for protection/survival. Something like fuedalism but without the agricultural focus of manorialism.
How bout we remove the heads of the wealthy and hoist them on petards outside their former dwellings instead? We don't need to justify the removal of these cancerous lumps of flesh we call "the elite". We don't need them. THEY NEED US.
"Every society is three meals away from chaos"
This is a recession - it will be a full-on depression if we get a doveish Fed chair... it might be one anyways, we'll need extremely adroit action to recover into a healthy economic state.
But hey, DOW go up and that's all we care about, right?
I'm not familiar with the healthcare sector. Is this where the job growth is?
The country is getting older and I expect there would be a lot of demand for non-AI-replaceable nurses and elder care. Many of those workers have also been deported or scared out of the country.
Real world, less so; HN-focused areas, absolutely. Nearly every mediocre, tech-focused healthcare start up is just a money siphon, no matter how many times their founders talk about “disruption”.
In actual healthcare, there are massive nursing shortages, and lots of need for people doing actual, hard, brick-and-mortar work.
https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/january-jobs-report-unemplo... | https://archive.today/9gdEO
Healthcare job increases should not be unexpected as the country ages, deaths outnumber births in 21 states (as of this comment), the demand for care will only grow over time.
https://usafacts.org/articles/america-is-getting-older-which...
> As of 2024, 18% (61.2 million) of Americans are 65 or older, according to Census Bureau data. The national population over the age of 65 has more than doubled since 1980, with three-quarters of that growth occurring in the 21st century. The 65 and older group grew by more than 26.2 million people, a 74.6% increase, during that time.
https://www.prb.org/resources/fact-sheet-aging-in-the-united...
> The number of Americans ages 65 and older is projected to increase from 58 million in 2022 to 82 million by 2050 (a 42% increase), and the 65-and-older age group’s share of the total population is projected to rise from 17% to 23%. The U.S population is older today than it has ever been. Between 1980 and 2022, the median age of the population increased from 30.0 to 38.9, but one-third (17) of states in the country had a median age above 40 in 2022, with Maine (44.8) and New Hampshire (43.3) at the top of the list.
It is very unlikely the work done by CNAs, RNs, physical therapists, and others providing this population care can or will be automated.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES2023700001
And if you look at something that's "flat" like transportation, its still essentially at all time highs right now, its just now declining slightly, but its on the heels of major growth: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES4300000001
Now if you look at one that's negative on the graph, like retail trade, and zoom out:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USTRADE
It's still essentially at all time highs!
Serious contractions in these things would be much more worrisome, but this data is basically fine. Some losses may just be temporal corrections from all time highs, like what happened to software jobs at the end of ZIRP (though Software now has separate problems to solve wrt job market).
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/goldman-nasdaq-ceos-headlin...
Additive Manufacturing, industrial robotics, the Internet, and the proliferation of computers had already made large portions of manufacturing and low skill white collar jobs redundant by the mid-2010s.
Furthermore, the brutal reality is most businesses can generate revenue growth just by concentrating on the 90th percentile and above of households [0], (edit: or at best the 70th percentile of households of income [1]).
For example, despite all the love Costco gets on HN - the reality is it only targets customers within the top 50% of households by income [2]. You may delude yourself into thinking that you are a thrifty underdog when you shop at Costco, but the reality is most Americans cannot and will never be able to afford Costco, and Costco doesn't want or need their business.
A K-Shape Economy is actually the historical norm.
[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/income-share-of-the-top-1...
[1] - https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
[2] - https://www.businessinsider.com/how-costco-sams-club-shopper...
That said, the reality is that the 70th percentile of household income nationally is a little over $130K [0] and the US is a country with a population of around 341 Million people.
Therefore, you can have a self-sustaining consumer market with around 100 Million Americans who are members of households earning above $130k a year - you would end up with a significantly larger TAM than targeting the bottom 70%.
Most skilled (SWE, Accounting, Law), semi-skilled (Automation Engineer, Mechanic), civil service (Police, Teachers, Local government employees, Military), and union employees all marry people within this strata and remain in that strata.
[0] - https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
The reality is, America1 or France1 has tastes and sensibilities closer to India1 or China1 instead of America3. As such, there's no point targeting America3 or France3, because it doesn't dramatically grow your TAM the same way India1 or China1 could.
This is why Walmart and Amazon began pivoting heavily into the India and China consumer market in the mid-2010s.
The India 1/2/3 concept that Blume Ventures came up with is a modified version of a similar mental model we used to analyze China back in the 2000s and 2010s which itself is was forked from the principle of market segmentation.
That's why you find different companies targeting different subsegments of a market globally.
Additionally, we do live in a globalized world, so a brand that is at the lower rung in one market may try to upscale their value by targeting the upper portion of another market. You see this with Walmart which targets America2 but uses a different strategy to target China1 (Sam's Club China) and India1 (Best Price, Flipkart).
Conversely, a China1 or India1 brand can also try and successfully build market share in America2 and America3 in a manner that an America1 brand wouldn't want to do due to brand prestige implications. This is why you see SHEIN and Temu's popularity amongst America2 and America3 or Wellspun becoming the primary supplier for textile goods for Walmart and TJX.
> What's a reason that wouldn't also apply to india2,3?
If I understand correctly, it would also apply to India2-3, that's why nobody's proposing that.
I think a much more realistic explanation than robotics and 3d printing is the outsourcing of the social and environmental costs of industrialization to countries willing to bear it, like China, Vietnam and Mexico.
Containerized shipping, email, and computerized logistics have made globalization efficient, and therefore inevitable.
Heck, I used to live in LA as a kid at that time in the 90s and 2000s and the sweatshops (yes we had sweatshops) sewing clothes for Gap were staffed by undocumented Mexican, Korean, Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese migrants in the Fashion District.
On the other hand, even highly paid manufacturing segments like automotive had already normalized industrial robotics by the early 2000s [0].
Basically, income mobility was already dead by the 1990s [1]. The difference is most Boomer HNers were insulated by that because it is clear almost everyone on HN who grew up during that era grew up in a 50th percentile and above household back then and wasn't the head of a household in the 1980-2005 period.
[0] - https://unece.org/sites/default/files/datastore/fileadmin/DA...
Someone has to wipe our Boomer arses. An aging population means more healthcare and less of everything else.
And a much more intense shift to financialization.
Pension funds tends to target an IRR of around 20-30%, and it is they that are the biggest pools of capital that funds invest.
You ain't hitting that amount of IRR without an extreme degree of financial ruthlessness.
I would be very curious to see if any circular deals aka funny money have been factored in there.
Also, despite literal hundreds of billions presumably invested in data centers where's all the construction, energy, communication, and other infrastructure build activity?
> The latest monthly jobs report published on Feb. 11 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed job growth was weaker in 2025 than initially reported, but it also showed hiring picked up in January.
The 2025 numbers were revised down (by the largest number in history - again), and no changes have been made to the methodology/models, which means that January data will be revised, too, so nothing shows that "hiring picked up"
Prior to that it was incredibly unreliable; but I've only had success using it once (trying all mirrors) in the last couple of weeks.
Does anyone have recommendations for alternatives?
I have found that https://archive.today/, https://archive.is/ and https://archive.ph/ don't resolve correctly when using quad9 or cloudflare dns servers. To work around that I use other dns servers for their name resolution. Maybe you're experiencing a similar issue?
I doubt we will see most of these impacts for 10 to 20 years. I wonder if this is a reason Trump wants low interest rates ? With low rates the rich can borrow at a low fixed rate and purchase items like Gold and Land. Then when rates have to raise, more $ for them.
Have you been to Seattle lately?
It's also reasonable to expect prices to go down if there is a productivity boom.
https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/bifurcated-how-the-...
The op didn't say that scarce goods would become something only the rich could afford, they said no one would buy anything.
Prices can only go up because to do otherwise harms shareholder value. None of the COVID inflation prices have come back down even though supply recovered. Prices continue going up.
Housing breaks that somewhat, but on average people consume more of it (larger, higher quality spaces), so it isn't really apples to apples.
Private sector: + 687,000
Government sector: – 319,000
Total: + 181,000
---
The government sector doesn't produce virtually anything that counts toward GDP, so GDP growth relates not to 181k of total employment growth but to 687k of private-sector growth. So, no, this is not about eliminating jobs and a few people getting rich. It is about statistcs, and lying to force the agenda.
By a very narrow, technically-correct view, sure.
Preventing, say, people starving to death, dying of preventable disease, unchecked fraud, invasions by other countries, etc. probably helps GDP a bit.
Even if we take your premise as given, isn't ~700,000 a pretty terrible number? Last year's headlines were, 2024 job growth was much lower than previously estimated, at only 1.5 million. 2023 was 2.7 million. Even if we put that down to pandemic recovery, typical pre-pandemic numbers were around 2 million outside of recessions.
This sounds very wrong?
> Gross Domestic Product (GDP) includes consumer spending, government spending, net exports, and total investments.
I'm ignoring the fact that I don't actually know how government sector jobs contribute to or affect GDP.
Seems like by this logic, why not just cut ALL government jobs? Obviously that's a terrible idea...
a) the AI narrative is annoying if not intellectually dishonest as so much money is invested in it
b) this requires a trigger warning
But if we are counting no. of payrolls: might this statistic hide the effect which mass scale deportations had?
Note: not an US citizen
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.
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.
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
We are short DoorDash, Inc - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45690430 - October 2025
DoorDash: Unauthorized Dasher “Backdooring” Scheme Props Up Delivery Operations, Undermines Safety, and Unravels as Immigration Enforcement Widens - https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b... - October 23rd, 2025
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.)
~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.
Over 65? Congratulations, You Own the Economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065194 - February 2026
Seven economic facts about prime-age labor force participation - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/seven-economic-facts-abou... - July 1st, 2025
New Research of U.S. Labor Force Participation and Employment Finds Shrinking Prime-Age Worker Population Being Filled by Older Workers - https://www.ebri.org/content/new-research-of-u.s.-labor-forc... - August 23rd, 2024
Are Older Workers Propping Up The U.S. Economy? - https://seekingalpha.com/article/4531829-older-workers-propp... | https://archive.today/sKeyE - August 9th, 2022
> 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%.
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.