Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid off in the first weeks of 2024.Why is that? (npr.org)

They have been saying recession is 6 months away for two years now.

It’s because the economy is not strong and the numbers like CPI, unemployment, and inflation have been manipulated (By manipulating the basket of goods or changing the definition of unemployment) to paint a rosy picture that doesn’t match reality.

My large co virtually only laid off in US. We have employees worldwide. US employees get paid at least 2x more than next most country and have less worker protections compared to our other countries.

The company where I work is laying off in the US while growing in India and Central/Eastern Europe

Theoretically you see it coming as you're day in / day out in the weeds of a business.

You are also probably way less insulated from macroeconomic shocks.

You will still have a job it just won’t pay anything

Nobody using that quote is referring to the whims of the economy, they're referring to the different risk profiles between having 100 customers and being in an employee.

The idea is that being a business owner hedges your bets.

Whether that shakes out is entirely dependent on how important your product or service is to your customers in a downturn. Some services are completely worthless in a downturn (recruitment services), others can be essential or even come with higher demand (marketing).

As a tech employee, I saw thousands of people get laid off.

25 years ago, I started my own business. I haven't been laid off since --- and I haven't laid off anyone either.

There have been ups and downs --- but definitely more ups.

I have full control over how to address "macroeconomic conditions" and the ability to mitigate risk by diversifying beyond a single market segment.

As an employee, you are at the whim and mercy of others with little or no control. There is less responsibility but way more risk and uncertainty.

Yes, but the macroeconomic conditions aren't in any way bad right now. These companies are all still making money hand over fist, and whatever issues they're having are primarily self-inflicted.

Well you can look at the history before central banking or even modern capitalism. It was still boom and bust. Not aware of any economies historically that were just stable for long periods of time.

Capitalism needs the state to function, because the legal pooling of assets and authority that takes place within capitalism needs laws and enforcement. Someone who comes in and says they're an "owner" without that backing just gets their stuff stolen - that is how things tend to play out in cultures that don't have a strong central hierarchy. So, having the state set the rules is a way to have the hierarchy with relatively less overt violence and an emphasis on trade relations as a form of status. The violence instead gets redirected towards market competition, exploitation, legal threats, etc.

From that, the rest of capitalism as a system derives from whatever rules are in play at the moment: the numbers of the financial system, acting as scorekeeping, drive speculative manias and panics, and the laws in the court are weapons to use on whoever opposes you. The system stays stable where it supports the overlapping interests of the elite - so all the formalities of government are just a continuous process of normalization; if a so-and-so wants the country to go in big in a certain direction - to train a kind of workforce or build an industry or invest in developing a technology - they can groom the political system to go their way, provided everyone else at the top agrees. A lot of things go undeveloped because "there is no money in them," and this is just a reflection of lack of political will to make that the thing that someone could have as a job. The technological competition of industrialization did a great deal to wake up the sleepy parts of the world into thinking "we need to change policies if I want to stay in power", and we definitely have more of that ahead.

This is more evidenced when you visit a different country and you look around and ask "why is this part so much better and that part so much worse" and a local will tell you that the law does this and the economy does that, so you get a better thing here and a worse thing there.

And that's all a bit disappointing because it means we really don't have a lot of things figured out and are just reacting like the apes we are as all these new things sweep through society, but it does mean that we could potentially do a lot better by getting the right kinds of conversations started.

I just finished a book called the capital order which addressed an alternative theory that I thought was fairly compelling.

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Aus...

Here is the summary from the publisher:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707...

Obviously not mainstream theory (that primary theory is that capitalism has intrinsic boom and bust cycles) but I found it compelling. It’s important to understand that in Jane Austin’s books price and wealth was so stable that she used their annual allowances and salaries to identify the social classes of who she was talking about — that didn’t change in her era nearly as rapidly as the modern world, so much so that salaries and allowances were stable enough to be used in this way. Imagine how crazy the book would sound if it was someone in 2024 trying to make references with 1970s salaries! So the modern monetary system has a rather large amount of drift due to fiat currency’s inherent loss of value.

It’s important to separate the boom and bust cycle from fiat currency cycles, as a lot of stability we feel in the modern world is actually the constantly collapsing value of our medium of exchange… it creates a lot of price / asset distortions and “investment” opportunities where simply holding onto a capital asset unproductively provides a return as the value of the currency used to purchase the asset rather than an improvement in the assets actual underlying value. This pushes speculation and the accumulation of assets to the top of the wealth strategy pile, which leads to speculative asset bubbles. And in order to make this deeply profitable derivatives — pure financial instruments that represent “bets” on assets — become widespread, even further distorting real markets. These derivative markets are beyond conception large at this point. It’s not necessarily causative but I would suggest enhances their severity and scale.

There’s so many distortions it’s hard to pull apart one from the other, but that’s what I’ve been thinking about. Capitalism bad is trendy thinking and nonsensical. This system, despite its very deep problems, is responsible for pulling 2/3 of the world out of poverty and is the most consistent force for positive civilization we have ever discovered. We simply need to adjust the systems incentives and harness the very same system that’s causing so much destruction to help reverse its own negative effects. This is common sense, but the current trend is towards self-hated and it’s very trendy to call for the downfall of the entire current system.

Capitalism can have socialism incorporated: plenty of countries do it. There isn’t a pure approach that’s going to work in the broader world, but it’s incredibly important to understand assets, fiat, bubbles and the system that allows them as a spectrum of various systems and not reduce it down to the convenient but nonsensical talking points people use on social media.

I could go on and on about this subject. The biggest issue we have with our current system is that it’s been taken up as a cause de jour by respective sides of passionate but supposedly opposite political parties and people are invested in their viewpoints as self-ideology and find different views therefore ideologically and personally threatening, and also try to assign any conversation ...