Imagine if we rolled the AI productivity gains made possible by all our data and rolled it into the 4 day workweek. It’d still leave 5-10 pp efficiency gain for shareholder presents and actually improve quality of life for everyone.
The evidence given in the linked Axios article is a stronger justification for unlimited holidays and/or summer Fridays than anything else.<p>The real reasons appear to be revenge spending (which was predicted) and higher personal incomes.<p>It’s hard to see how any of this is tied to remote work specifically from the actual article.
The reason is because for the price of things to crash relative to dollars, there needs to be a shortage of dollars relative to the things that can be bought with dollars and since more dollars are being printed constantly and at zero cost by the government and banks, it's simply impossible to create enough goods and services in the economy to vacuum up all those dollars.<p>Attempts have been made to make dollars appear scarce to the masses by manufacturing extreme wealth inequality but the inflation we're seeing today likely comes from wealthy consumers, not from the masses. The masses are already totally squeezed out of all wealth-creation opportunities and the system is just creating tons of wasteful bullshit jobs for them instead. The system we have today is utterly incapable of using the masses for anything other than bullshit bureaucratic jobs because it doesn't want the masses to compete against existing corporations; it needs a way to keep them busy but, as a side effect, this anti-competitive economy just destroys innovation through the systematic deprivation of opportunities.
Probably not.<p>Mostly it is because we're still dealing with bullwhip effects from the pandemic, and the interest rate hikes from the Fed haven't really had time yet.<p>It takes 6-12 months from the end of rate hikes for a recession to hit, and given how fast the rate hikes were and that policy was still accommodative up until earlier this year my expectations are closer to the tail end of that range--and we're not even certain the Fed is done with rate hikes yet.<p>If this strong economy results in a resurgence of inflation and more tight labor markets then the Fed may continue with a terminal policy much higher than we think is possible right now (and that kicks the end date of Fed rate hikes even further down the road, along with the 6-12 month recession expectation).