Quote:
Originally Posted by Icky Thump
No one wanted to curb inflation. The great resignation happened because people saw multimillion 401ks coupled with death from going to the office and said "fuck that noise." How else to get them back to work other than stomping the 401k values with some well-timed spending and rate increases.
Housing is next. But not too much so that people riot.
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I don't think they're getting them back to the office as they'd like. Hybrid is here to stay.
I think Covid created a reawakening - a realization of the shortness and fragility of life - that's hard to stifle.
The old men and their old ways were being questioned before Covid. We all know this system of fake capitalism doesn't work. Covid didn't break it. It merely forced us to test whether we could operate differently. And yes, we very much can - and more productively.
The "Dammit, we'll have the status quo back!" club sounds desperate, and they should be. Some workers will be fired in this sorta-recession we're going to have. But many more will not be fired. Instead of shedding workers which are hard to come by, firms will shed more office space. And they'll seek to attract talent cheaply by offering flexibility.
The old men in corner offices and the REITs exposed heavily to office space who've been talking up how the office is going to come back, and how a recession is going to force workers back under thumb are shooting themselves in the foot. They're fucking themselves, but just don't see it yet. Because they can't. Because these spoiled, narrow minded rentier capitalists can't think outside the rules of the only world they know.
They think things can't change, that their recently developed laws of economics are laws of physics, falling to miss what David Graeber stated in the
Utopia of Rules:
"The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently."
Mother Nature just slammed us with a pandemic. And these arrogant old men think their systems are so resilient that they'll just shrug it off and things will be as they were before. Sorry, but if men can make the world run differently, Mother Nature can sure as shit do so. And no reference to Adam Smith's or Riccardo's laws on supply, demand, labor flexibility, etc. is going to convince millions of people who knew they were getting fucked before the pandemic to buy back into the architecture that had been fucking them.
