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Originally Posted by RainMaker
I should add that there are not articles about labor shortages in the 6-figure executive field. Odd how the high paying jobs are easy to fill. Maybe there is a correlation between pay and working.
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Of course there is. But it's also self-evidently not viable to pay entry-level workers six figures. So we have a couple of options here.
** Most businesses in America are incompetent to the point of not taking reasonable steps to address the labor shortage and allow their businesses to produce products at the level of consumer demand. If so we are simply going to have product shortages indefinitely, because the people running these companies are too dumb to even try to address the situation. This will also drive inflation, which hurts everyone.
** If that's not the case, and frankly even if it is, there's an upper-limit on what some jobs can pay without drastically increases prices. Eventually something's going to give. Either businesses will increase prices and wages significantly, which will hurt the poor the worst in terms of affording necessities but will ripple out to everyone, or people will eventually start coming back to work out of necessity. My guess is that the latter will happen, but the longer it takes the more it hurts everyone. The average American was already leveraged up in debt far too much before the pandemic; there's only so much more you can borrow etc. and a limit will eventually be reached.
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Originally Posted by RainMaker
It could be cutting costs by moving in with parents or eliminating expenses. Perhaps dual-income homes have decided they'd rather be single-income homes where one parent stays with the kids. Or a mix of a bunch of factors.
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None of that adequately explains our current situation, particularly for the middle-class-and-below sector of society that generally doesn't have the resources to make the dramatic kinds of cutbacks that would be required. For upper income classes, yes absolutely that can happen.
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Originally Posted by RainMaker
So if you're running at barebones while being wildly profitable, where do you go when things take a turn for the worse? We're finding out.
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Except that in most sectors of the economy we haven't seen profit margins going through the roof. So that doesn't seem to be a tenable theory.