Tema: PPCC-Pisitófilos Creditófagos-Invierno 2022

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.expansion.com/pais-vasco/2023/03/03/6401c4d1468aeba3128b4692.html

https://www.pressreader.com/spain/expansion-nacional-sabado/20230304/page/32/textview

Gobierno y agentes sociales abren la puerta a suplir con extranjeros la falta de albañiles y camioneros

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.expansion.com/empresas/motor/2023/03/04/640265b7468aebb8728b4585.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.expansion.com/ahorro/2023/03/04/64020fdf468aeb9d478b45c1.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.expansion.com/economia/financial-times/2023/03/03/6401ddc1468aebbe058b45a8.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.expansion.com/opinion/2023/03/03/64021bafe5fdea0d218b465e.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.expansion.com/opinion/2023/03/03/64021595e5fdeaae438b45ee.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.expansion.com/expansion-empleo/empleo/2023/03/03/6401e11ae5fdeac4028b465f.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://lectura.kioskoymas.com/el-pais/20230305/page/64/textview

La ministra del derecho a la vivienda

Saludos.

[Benzino Napaloni]

https://www.expansion.com/expansion-empleo/empleo/2023/03/03/6401e11ae5fdeac4028b465f.html

Saludos.

Subida del 20% de los sueldos... en España.

Ni el articulista ni más de una empresa parecen haber entendido la situación. Un ingeniero español que domine el inglés y que tenga disciplina para trabajar de forma autónoma tiene ante sí prácticamente el mundo entero como mercado. A las empresas de fuera les supone no subir salarios, sino ahorrar dinero en ese sentido.

Se junta en la coctelera que el invierno demográfico afecta a todo occidente, y ahí lo tenemos. Fuera aún tienen dinero para pagar al capaz.


Curioso cómo el artículo mezcla conceptos del "ofertademandismo" propios del ladrillo (jode bastante ser la parte perjudicada), con la confesión de que hay una falta real de trabajadores: el 90% de los despedidos en USA y UK tardó menos de cuatro semanas en encontrar otra cosa.

La burbuja tecnológica es simplemente de Metas, Twitters, y de humo que no ofrece soluciones reales. La informática real y "antimolona" tiene demanda y trabajo para parar un tren.

[wanderer]

Esto, me dejó virolo, que diría un argentino:

Un separatista echa a su hijo con asperger por hablar en español: "Si España está por encima de la familia, márchate"
Le quería "catalanizar", asegura el joven -a LD- muy afectado. Ahora está "en situación de desamparo", explica su abogada, Vanessa González.
https://www.libertaddigital.com/espana/2023-03-05/un-separatista-echa-a-su-hijo-con-asperger-por-hablar-en-espanol-si-espana-esta-por-encima-de-la-familia-marchate-6992344/

Y luego es que el padre lo tiene todo: indepe radical, explotador laboral (empezando por su propio hijo). Viniendo de LD no ahondan en si es un pisitos full equipe, pero apostaría mis pelotas y no las pierdo, que sí.

[Benzino Napaloni]

Esto, me dejó virolo, que diría un argentino:

Un separatista echa a su hijo con asperger por hablar en español: "Si España está por encima de la familia, márchate"
Le quería "catalanizar", asegura el joven -a LD- muy afectado. Ahora está "en situación de desamparo", explica su abogada, Vanessa González.
https://www.libertaddigital.com/espana/2023-03-05/un-separatista-echa-a-su-hijo-con-asperger-por-hablar-en-espanol-si-espana-esta-por-encima-de-la-familia-marchate-6992344/

Y luego es que el padre lo tiene todo: indepe radical, explotador laboral (empezando por su propio hijo). Viniendo de LD no ahondan en si es un pisitos full equipe, pero apostaría mis pelotas y no las pierdo, que sí.

Bueno... El tema de la "indapandansia" aquí lo veo como algo secundario. Los caraduras que se envuelven en una banderita y luego hacen toda clase de ilegalidades están en todo el espectro político.

Y sí, LD en el tema del ladrillo se sabe perfectamente para dónde barre. Deben de tener un abono premium con los de la alarmita que hace de todo menos funcionar bien.

[Derby]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64853683

Food shortages due to 'supermarket culture', says Leon co-founder

The government's food tsar has blamed Britain's "weird supermarket culture" for shortages of certain vegetables.

Henry Dimbleby said "fixed-price contracts" between supermarkets and suppliers meant that when food is scarce, some producers sell less to the UK and more elsewhere in Europe.

But the body that represents supermarkets denied that business was hampered by such contracts.

Several supermarkets have limited sales of fresh produce in recent weeks.

Tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are among those vegetables in scarce supply, largely because of extreme weather affecting harvests in Spain and North Africa.

Shortages are said to have been compounded by high energy prices impacting UK growers, as well as issues with supply chains.

They also come as households are being hit by rising prices, with food inflation at a 45-year high.

As an example of "market failure", Mr Dimbleby, who advises the government on food strategy in England, said UK lettuce prices in supermarkets were kept stable, regardless of whether there was a shortage or over supply.

He said this meant farmers could not sell all their produce when they had too much - or be incentivised to grow more.

"If there's bad weather across Europe, because there's a scarcity, supermarkets put their prices up - but not in the UK. And therefore at the margin, the suppliers will supply to France, Germany, Ukraine," he told the Guardian newspaper.

But Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium (BRC), which represents UK supermarkets, said retailers were "pragmatists and recognise they need to pay more when costs are high and product is short".

"They're working with growers every day," he added.

Mr Opie said regulation for supermarkets in many European countries meant retailers there were "able to, and actually required" to pass on extra costs to customers.

"Whereas UK retailers are doing everything they can to insulate consumers from rapidly rising prices meaning cutting their margins and negotiating on behalf of customers to keep prices as low as possible," he added.

He said importing tomatoes and lettuces from abroad during the winter allowed supermarkets to offer customers "best value for money".

Mr Dimbleby, however, said he found the current situation "frustrating" because "everyone is suddenly worried about a gap of vegetables in February, when there are much bigger structural issues".

"There's just this weird supermarket culture," he said. "A weird competitive dynamic that's emerged in the UK, and nowhere else in the world has it, and I don't know why that is."

He added it was a "very difficult one for the government to solve".

Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers' Union (NFU), told the BBC that some producers were on contracts that could be renegotiated to factor in higher production costs - but not all of them.

"The fact that these contracts in many cases are not fit for purpose and if you're not getting a fair return for what it is costing you, you're going to contract your business," she said.

"It's why we are seeing many of the glasshouses across the country mothballed. They should be producing high quality food, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, to deal with this shortage."

The NFU president said the war in Ukraine had changed the outlook for food security, but added she had been told previously by ministers and officials that "food grown on our land is really not important at all, we are a wealthy nation and we can afford to import it".

"I think that is now looking naïve in the extreme," she said. "We've got huge capability here to be producing more of our fruit and vegetables."

The government said that while there were some issues with fresh vegetable supplies, the UK "has a highly resilient food chain and is well equipped to deal with disruption".

"We meet regularly with representatives from the entire food system - from farm to fork - to discuss how we can respond to emerging situations impacting the supply chain quickly and effectively," a spokesperson said.

Mr Dimbleby criticised the government last year and said ministers had only taken on half of his recommendations from a landmark review of Britain's food system.

He told the Guardian that food shortages would not be resolved until ministers looked at what he outlined in his food strategy.

Last year, the UK faced a shortage of eggs, with supermarkets limiting how many customers could buy.

The BRC said at the time that a variety of factors including avian flu and the cost of production had hit supplies - but some farmers blamed retailers for not paying a fair price.

[Derby]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-05/house-prices-intergenerational-inequality-how-did-we-get-here/102048266

Housing policies favour the rich and leave first home buyers out of the market. How did it come to this?

Working to buy your own home is a rite of passage in Australia, firmly rooted in a time when government delivered plentiful, affordable housing.

Following the senseless poverty and destitution inflicted by price-gouging landlords during the Depression, we created a better, more equitable housing system after World War II.

Up until the mid-1970s, government took a hands-on approach to housing, constructing homes for people to buy or rent at low cost. Investors weren't prioritised over the rights of people who needed shelter, and governments helped people buy with cheap loans.

It was these settings that generalised the home-owning dream to over 70 per cent of Australian households by the late 1960s.

Australia's housing a 'closed shop'

But from the 1980s, Australia's housing system was being transformed into a "closed shop", working to expand the wealth of existing home owners and investors. If you owned a home, you had membership to Australia's exclusive wealth-builders' club.

Generous tax concessions flowed to home owners, who were encouraged to expand their financial position, spending on their own house and maybe a rental property. The capacity to stash 50 per cent of the spoils from selling a house away from the tax man, paying capital gains tax on only the remaining 50 per cent, combined with negative gearing, meant easy money without having to move yourself, and an annual cash-flow boost through interest deductibility at every income tax return.

After pumping up the insiders' gains, government abandoned its role in new construction, handing the reins of housing supply to private interests. The majority of public dwellings, built by state housing authorities after the war, had already been sold off, mostly to the households occupying them, such that less than 4 per cent of all homes are government-owned today.

After cutting supply, governments increased demand for housing. Tax concessions cultivated an investor class, but so did weakened lending regulations, which saw an explosion in new lending, as investors received almost the same loan rates as owner-occupiers.

House price growth was speeding ahead of employment incomes, and political pressure to respond to intergenerational and class inequality grew. Governments responded by ploughing billions into schemes to assist first-home buyers. Twenty billion dollars was spent in helping some young and low-income people into the market throughout the 2010s, but by 2021 this was little more than a Band-Aid over a bullet wound.

False scarcity

Australia's gold-plated housing system manufactures false scarcity. It excludes an ever-larger group of people, for whom housing becomes a rare commodity.

Contrary to rudimentary supply-demand theory, individuals holding ownership of the hottest product in human life have zero interest in expanding supply to meet demand for affordable, decent homes. They sit and wait for prices to increase, and people borrow more and more to keep up.

Worse still, Australia helps older, wealthy owners of housing to keep cashing in on the lack of affordable homes and rising prices. Economists Matt Grudnoff and Eliza Littleton found that almost three-quarters of the capital gains tax discount housing benefit goes to the top 10 per cent of households by income, and more than three-quarters to people aged 50 and over.

People under 40 receive only 6 per cent of capital gains tax discount benefits. It's a government-bankrolled gravy train, and there are no wealth or inheritance taxes in sight.

Many young people are locked out of a housing system dominated by rich older people. The housing industry is at pains to hide this, selling the longstanding lie that the Australian landlords reducing their taxes are average-earning mums and dads, while in reality the beneficiaries of negative gearing are overwhelmingly wealthy.

More than half of the $4.3 billion annual benefit from negative-gearing tax cuts goes to the top 20 per cent of households by income. Those aged between 40 and 60 capture more than 60 per cent of the concessions.

Deposits of $120,000 'simply impossible'

Even if lucrative tax concessions were unpicked to support a more level playing field in our housing system, young people's pain is multiplied in the jobs market.

The Productivity Commission found that real incomes for people aged 15–24 declined by an average of 1.6 per cent every year over the decade 2008–18. Incomes fell slightly less for the Millennials aged 25–34, but still fell 0.7 per cent each year. Over the same period, real incomes for the over 65s increased by 37 per cent … . The only cohort emphatically mobilising is the oldest.

Since young people lost a decade of income growth after the global financial crisis, lower incomes mean they can't build savings at the same rate as older generations. The 20 per cent deposit of $120,000 to buy a median capital city unit is simply impossible for many young people to reach, placing home ownership in fantasy territory.

Right now, thin savings blankets already mean severe distress when shit hits the fan. Without a secure income or roof over young people's heads, economic shocks are more severe, overall health and wellbeing diminished, and the ability to grasp opportunities for other jobs or study compromised.

Widening intergenerational inequality centres around our housing system, with billions pumped into making houses more valuable. Many people who own those houses obtained them decades ago when prices were lower and you could rely on available jobs that paid enough to buy one. In the mid-1980s, the median earner forked out three times their annual income for a home, compared to the record-high 8.5 times their income in 2022.

But it's not the old widower on your street who's to blame; the bloke who bought his inner-city house in the 1970s for $15,000 and saw it rise to $1 million by retirement. Access to the basics of life is not the problem. Follow the big investor money.

Permanent renting a new reality

While Australia encourages the wealthiest households to build housing assets, it forces young and low-income households into an increasingly pressured private rental market. Over 60 per cent of people aged under 30 are renting, with this age group experiencing the sharpest increase in renting arrangements than any other age group since 1996.

Low welfare payments and casual jobs are no match for rising rents. In fact, based on current rates for renting one bedroom in a two-bedroom unit, an average 18-year-old working in hospitality or retail, or receiving Youth Allowance, meets the definition of housing stress in every capital city in the country.

Australia's private rental system was designed to be a tenancy of transition, not a permanent encounter. But renting permanently is the reality for a growing number of low-income people, including youth, older women, those with disabilities, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Governments have failed to catch up with this seismic shift in rental dependency. Without regulation of rental conditions, human dignity and security of tenure are railroaded by landlords, who routinely price gouge, abuse tenants, and offer dilapidated, inadequate, poor-quality housing.

After momentarily cooling with reduced demand in the pandemic lull, and various short-term measures introduced by state governments to relieve renters — including moratoriums on evictions and prohibitions on rent increases — rental prices have since surged. In the 12 months to September 2022, rental prices grew nationally by 15 per cent, and vacancy rates fell to their lowest level since 2006 at less than 1 per cent, with ongoing floods in New South Wales and Victoria placing greater strain on already-slim housing stocks in regional areas.

The shortened supply of suitable rental properties in many pockets of the country facilitates invasive practices by real estate agents too, who routinely encourage rent-bidding and payment of several months' rent in advance, and demand financial and personal records from tenants. All for the privilege of paying off someone else's mortgage!

Australian landlords demand a return on their investment as a matter of entitlement. As a class, they pocket billions in housing tax concessions, contribute to rising prices, and then demand their poorer tenants keep up with rents.

Retrofitting a rental system designed to build the wealth of investors into one that meets human need costs us a pretty penny. The sneaky, indirect subsidy not often acknowledged is the almost $5 billion spent annually in Commonwealth Rent Assistance — a supplement paid by the federal government to people on meagre social security payments trying to keep a roof over their heads — which underpins the private rental system.

Australians idolise self-employment as an escape from the horrors of bad bosses, and it's not hard to see the appeal of owner occupation to escape landlords. People would rather scrounge and submit to a lifetime of bank debt just to escape the indignity of individuals unfairly emboldened by our policies to determine the life course of others.

Why, after all, should young people be fixed in a cycle of helping secure wealth for older generations?

Inequality within and between generations

In a housing system generating inequality both within and between generations, all young people face rising hurdles to home ownership compared to earlier post-war generations, but those with the lowest incomes suffer the most.

Parental lending is reported with humour in our media — the Bank of Mum and Dad is now the ninth biggest mortgage lender — but this creeping return to feudal social relations is a shocking development in a nation that defined itself against the rigid class hierarchies of Britain.

Australia's investor-dominated housing system has walked the nation to the cliff's edge of our egalitarian history; whereas employment income was once sufficient to secure housing and a good life, working any job today is no longer enough — the wealth you're born into increasingly determines your life chances.

While young people have nothing to gain from a housing system built on ever-rising prices and inherited wealth, it doesn't mean they'll revolt. I've seen an uncomfortable trend among many middle-class young people who've resigned themselves to insecure, unfulfilling jobs, and a sense they won't transcend their parents' financial or professional success.

Australia's housing system is politically conservatising. The vast majority of wealth held by middle-class and upper-middle-class households is concentrated in land holdings, between 56 and 88 per cent of their net wealth. That's a lot of eggs in the status quo basket.

Disenfranchised young people see that economic opportunity may go backwards in their lifetime, but at least they'll inherit the house when Mum and/or Dad kick the bucket. But with the average age of people inheriting wealth in the 50s, it's an awfully long time to wait.

Hoping for a crash

What's the effect of all this? Australia's jobs, housing and tax policies are writing the futures of people who have no chance of contributing to the story. It's why 53 per cent of young Australians expect to be financially worse off than their parents.

Deloitte's 2022 Global 2022 Gen Z and Millennial Survey shows the biggest issue plaguing Millennials and Gen Z is the rising cost of living. Almost half of young people globally live from one pay day to the next.

On top of the sense that the rising cost of living will price them out of having a family, many fear delivering their future progeny into a climate apocalypse. Existential doom and mass disempowerment are taking a grip on young people's thinking. They're trying to make the right choices against a backdrop of collapsed collective movements and government inaction against an energised global fossil fuel sector.

With economic exclusion carrying lifelong consequences for employment, health and welfare, it's unsurprising that many young people have given up. One in ten people aged 15–24 is not engaged in any education, employment or training. Just under one-third (29 per cent) report having poor or very poor mental health.

Severe psychological distress has grown since 2017, with youth from low socio-economic and regional backgrounds experiencing the highest rates of mental illness. Young people feel the terrible weight of a society that is failing them.

Without hope of buying homes, young people engage in their favourite big crisis pastime: welcoming a market crash. With the pandemic came renewed faith in total economic carnage as the route to owner occupation — a hope that prices would crash and they'd finally be able to afford a home. These ideas are inspired by the collapse of the US financial system after the global financial crisis, though such an event is entirely ill-fit for Australia's housing system.

Why a housing crash won't happen in Australia

One of my favourite economists, Hyman Minsky, wrote about how asset price inflation emerges in modern financial markets, and what governments do when it goes belly up. When prices rise unsustainably, get away from their underlying value and enter free-fall, government swoops in as the lender-of-last-resort, socialising financial losses before debt deflation infects the rest of the economy.

Exactly whose losses government socialises is the real question — as seen with the trillion-dollar bailout for US corporations during the GFC while thousands of working-class Americans lost their homes.

Hoping highly leveraged poorer households lose their homes to bring down prices is no pathway to housing security for Australian youth. Morality aside, any generalised housing market crash in Australia is highly unlikely because astronomical levels of public money are pumped into the system already, including $14 billion every year in tax concessions and more in subsidies.

But then, as Minsky reminds us, government will do everything it can to prevent a housing system crash because housing is so heavily intertwined with the stability of Australia's banking system, which is, in turn, highly concentrated in mortgage lending.

The big four banks hold $1.9 trillion in mortgage loans, which comprises 65 per cent of all their liabilities. Unlike the United States, Australia's problem isn't securitisation and unregulated "shadow banking"; it's big, national banks that have monopolised credit provision and rake in easy profits by tightening the screws on workers' mortgages and making houses more expensive.

Even if government unwound unsustainable tax concessions and built more houses, house prices might decline moderately, but never bottom out. So, waiting for housing prices to enter free fall is another pipedream.

But with 69 per cent of young people now believing government has a responsibility to provide access to affordable housing for everyone, the scene is set for new and creative solutions to Australia's housing crisis — the likes and scale of which we've never seen — including mass urban social and public housing projects, and shared-equity and cooperative housing schemes. With the advancement of a new national affordable housing agenda, "generation rent" may finally taste secure independence.

Our housing has been in 'dark territory' before

After the war, strong unions made sure government kept up with people's expectations of a Fair Go. It made home ownership a reality for the average worker. But besides this brief period during the post-war reconstruction period when state governments focused on building public housing, Australia's housing system has been otherwise dominated by private provision.

In fact, giving investors the reins in the housing system has plunged us into dark territory before. The working class and poor were subjected to untrammelled landlord power in the rental market during the Depression — the only tenure available to them. People were packed into overcrowded, unsanitary homes, without regulations or controls against the exorbitant rents that consumed their paltry incomes.

During the Depression, rental housing became emblematic of a society failing to provide basic economic security to all people, to the benefit of a minority of property owners. Sound familiar?

What can we do to fix Australia's housing?

Let's not make the same mistake twice. Homes aren't commodities. We can transcend our past solutions to the same problem of private housing provision that we faced then. In the immediate post-war years, we expanded owner occupation to workers as the housing arrangements of civility and dignity.

Today, we must resolve the housing crisis by dramatically expanding public and social housing — dwellings constructed and leased at low cost by both government and community housing providers.

Australian workers once aspired to a humble home to call their own. But the era of public-bankrolled housing riches is a shameful turn in our history. It's time to stop subsidising property investors. Winding back multi-billion-dollar housing tax concessions will help us fund an upgrade to the Fair Go's remit for public services, with the right to secure housing too.

Building quality public and social housing alternatives to owning a home isn't just about fixing a crisis in which over 500,000 people languish waiting for social housing. It's also about shifting the focus of our nation's culture and identity.

From the late 1990s, Australians were told to keep their head down, work hard, suffer honourably like the diggers, and find solace in the rising value of their homes. This was John Howard's ideological project, which sought to dismantle working-class identity and replace it with "Aussie battlers".

But defining people's value based on economic conditions over which they have no control — like interest rates — has resulted in many workers becoming passive and without agency in the areas in which they can build power, like at work.

While the poorest suffer in material deprivation, Australia's housing system, running on a "get in, cash out" mantra, has fostered a toxic political constituency, and a deprived national psyche. Are we really a nation of one-dimensional wealth-builders?

If we could avoid locking people into the mortgage rat-race, huge amounts of time would be freed to explore more fulfilling jobs — and lives. This is already the reality in Nordic countries, where there is a wide repertoire of pro-social housing models like housing cooperatives, which amount to 22 per cent of the total housing stock in Sweden, and 40 per cent of all housing stock in Norway's capital, Oslo.

A national public housing construction program could build hundreds of thousands of units, with local materials and labour where possible, co-funded and delivered in partnership with state governments. They could be well-planned, high-quality, beautiful units, affordable and accessible to all.

We could also purchase existing privately owned dwellings, and renovate and repurpose them. Establishing a network of public housing community bodies could ensure new units were designed well, with residents helping manage the day-to-day running of their homes — just like they do in Sweden's housing cooperatives — rather than the present highly bureaucratic, paternalistic system.

There are others for whom owner occupation will remain important. Indeed, the majority of young Australians say owning a home is still a key goal. Government could extend concessional loans, or even consider creating a public bank to extend cheap credit, and change regulations to slow commercial investor lending.

It's a mighty challenge for Australia. We're weaning ourselves off a drug. But normalising public and social housing, coupled with the campaign for good jobs and dignified, secure incomes, would help redirect the enormous economic and cultural value Australians place in the individual ownership of land and property.

This priority shift is one of the most critical updates we can make to the legacy of the Fair Go, built on unceded Aboriginal lands, and our nation would be the richer for it.

[Derby]

https://www.businessinsider.com/boomer-greed-ruined-economy-gen-z-millennials-labor-shortage-inflation-2023-3

The Great Boomer Bottleneck

Their greed destroyed the economy — and now millennials and Gen Z are paying the price

Parents: Is there anything we can't blame on them? They bear the responsibility for our neuroses, the less flattering aspects of our appearance, and, now, the worst inflationary crisis since the 1970s.

The story of our inflation headache is one of scarcity: not enough people, homes, or ships. But while the arguments about post-COVID price chaos have focused overwhelmingly on short-term, pandemic-created triggers — such as closed factories and government rescue spending — inflation is also a story of larger tectonic shifts within the population.

Boomers, who were for a long time the largest generation in global history, are entering their twilight years. And as they ride off into the sunset, they're leaving behind an economy that isn't really built to accommodate the demands of the 21st century. Boomers have spent the past few decades shaping the world in such a way that has made the current crunch more painful and sets up future generations for continued deprivation.

The boomers' economy is brittle, stingy, and built on undersupply. While inflation may be cooling a bit, future prosperity for millennials, Gen Zers, and beyond depends on reversing this economywide bottleneck created by boomers.

Forget quiet quitting — let's talk about loud retirement

Among the more intensely discussed economic disruptions of the pandemic has been the widespread lack of workers. At the start of the COVID-19 emergency, there were too many potential causes of this labor shortage: loss of childcare, fear of illness, and surprisingly strong consumer demand that scrambled staffing needs. Many economic conservatives also blamed generous pandemic welfare measures like stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment insurance, which they claimed discouraged work. The shortage of labor pushed up wages for people able to keep a job and led the more obnoxious bosses and friends of your parents' to complain that "no one wants to work anymore."

Three years on, even after the programs that shouldered the blame for there being "no workers available" faded away, the labor shortage remains. The labor-force participation rate — the percentage of adults in the US who are either employed or actively seeking work — remains well below pre-pandemic levels. And researchers have determined the core source of this labor shortage: a wave of retirements in the generation complaining that young people lack a work ethic. The labor-force participation rate among people in their prime employment years, 25 to 54, is incredibly close to its pre-pandemic level, while the rate for those 55 and older is still down significantly. A working paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve found that a surge in retirees accounted for almost all of the decline in the labor-force participation rate up to October. A breakdown by the think tank Employ America in November found that a decline in participation by part-time workers 70 and older accounted for more than half the fall in employment of the older cohort.

It's a good thing that people over 70 are able to retire. But the flood of boomers now kicking back and relaxing has created a world with fewer people to replace them or to take care of them in their dotage. Experts at the Bank for International Settlements have concluded that over the history of modern capitalism there's been an extremely strong relationship between a population's age structure and inflation. The connection makes intuitive sense: If inflation is caused by a mismatch between supply and demand, then a surge in the number of retired people simultaneously increases the demand for certain kinds of labor-intensive, low-paying work like home-care aides or hospitality while shrinking the overall labor force. These dynamics will cause labor-force churn and drive up costs.

Boomers shrank the labor force they need now

The baby boomers ensured the labor market of the generations after them would be inadequate in a few major ways. First, they had substantially fewer children per household than their own parents. From the end of the baby boom in 1960 to most boomers' entrance into the workforce in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the American fertility rate declined from 3.7 births per woman to about two births per woman. While there are many reasons for the decline, some were positive developments. For example, more women pursued higher education and entered the labor market rather than resigning themselves to providing uncompensated care work, a societal shift that has persisted.

One way for a country to make up for a slowing fertility rate is to open its doors to immigrants. But as boomers became a steadily more powerful political bloc — peaking as a share of the electorate in 2004 and remaining the largest generational slice of voters until sometime shortly before 2020 — they elected politicians who pursued immigration policy that has slowly closed the door to prospective residents.

The politicians who ran the country during the boomers' childhood and young adulthood governed in the shadow of the Cold War, when competition from the Soviet Union led many in both parties to soften America's long-held racist laws like Jim Crow in the South or restrictions on non-European immigration. Both liberals and conservatives passed laws like the 1965 Immigration Act, which opened the country to major immigration for the first time since the 1920s, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted legal status to millions of mostly Mexican immigrants. After decades of progress, boomer politicians who ascended to power after the fall of communism felt no such pressure to adopt fairer, more inviting immigration policy. And cultural backlash to the growing number of immigrants in the country helped shift the tide against America's open door.

Democratic President Bill Clinton may have been more liberal than his two Republican predecessors, but his primary contribution to immigration policy was a massive militarization of the southern border, which set the template for federal policy. During the post-9/11 war on terror, George W. Bush went even further, transforming the federal immigration bureaucracy into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, an arm of a global security and intelligence apparatus, and enlisting local police in the deportation system. While Barack Obama, a late boomer, pulled back from the most aggressive deportation strategies and enacted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which protected the children of immigrants from deportation, he didn't try to increase immigration. Simultaneously, boomer governors in border states imposed anti-immigrant measures of their own. And Donald Trump ramped up deportations and used nearly anything — security, the pandemic — as pretext to shut down immigration. The result of all these actions is a byzantine immigration system that makes it nearly impossible for people to seek out opportunities in America. After slowly recovering from a historic low in the 1970s, the percentage of US residents born abroad has stalled out. Valuable, highly skilled immigrants who've worked in America for years are under threat of being thrown out, and recent surveys have suggested the US is no longer the top destination for international migrants.

Despite the obvious economic downsides and harm to America's international image, politicians continue to support these draconian immigration policies in large part because of boomers. Those born between the end of World War II and the Immigration Act of 1965 grew up in the nadir of American immigration, when under 5% of the population was foreign-born. Sociologists have found that exposure to people from different countries and backgrounds during childhood strongly influences peoples' attitudes on immigration later in life. So it's no surprise that polling has indicated that boomers want to tamp down the flow of migrants while younger generations are more likely to know and sympathize with those who bear the brunt of harsher immigration policy.

The consequence of boomers' smaller families and anti-immigration policies is that as they retire they're creating a gap in the labor force they haven't planned to fill. And the once steady but now increased demand for labor leads to labor shortages and higher prices.

Boomer-driven shortages don't stop at workers

Boomers spent years depriving the economy in other ways beyond squeezing the labor force. One of the most glaring and obvious areas of this boomer bottleneck is housing. In 2019, boomers, only about 22% of the population, owned 42% of American homes, and they especially dominated homeownership in coastal markets.

Though boomers are retiring en masse, they only just began selling their longtime homes, and aren't downsizing fast enough to keep up with demand. Meanwhile, household formation is on the rise as millennials leave roommates, start families, and settle down. But many people in their late 20s and 30s are struggling to set down roots, because there aren't enough homes they can settle into near the strongest job markets. A few cities, like Houston and Atlanta, have greeted the surge in demand for new housing by encouraging tons of new supply, but many others, especially rich coastal metropolises like New York and San Francisco, have not. In the age of remote work, frustrated millennials who might be ascending the career ladder but couldn't get a grip on the property ladder in larger coastal metros have taken their big city salaries to smaller and less wealthy places where they can get bargains compared to Brooklyn — and outbid locals.

The longtime drag on construction in the country's strongest housing markets is largely due to zoning regulations that control which types of buildings can be built and where. These laws are ostensibly imposed to preserve local "character" and prevent "overdevelopment." But in many cases, these aesthetic and nostalgic concerns are a smokescreen for naked self-interest: Limiting the number of houses in prosperous places ensures sky-high valuations. Considering the pain falls mostly on those trying to enter the market — millennials and Gen Zers — it's not surprising that attitudes on housing are hardening into generational warfare between older homeowners wanting to grow their home-value nest eggs and younger pro-building renters trying to get on the housing wealth ladder.

The boomer ethos on housing, which views homes not as places to live but as financial assets, is mirrored in the rest of the economy boomers made. As the journalist Steven Brill has written, the shareholder revolution and financialization of the economy was largely a boomer affair, as they were the generation who staffed the financial firms that exploded in size and influence during the 1980s. Instead of investing productively into critical operations, boomers focused on pleasing shareholders and investors on Wall Street. That led to miserly "capital discipline" in essential sectors like energy: As demand rose, businesses increased prices to drive up profits and returned money to shareholders via dividends instead of investing in more capacity. Elsewhere, the relentless shareholder focus on cost cutting birthed the just-in-time supply chain, which shrank inventories and grew margins but couldn't handle shocks like the pandemic.

In sector after sector, as boomers took ownership of the economy's assets, they essentially pulled up the ladder of investment in favor of maximizing short-term personal gains.

Breaking the boomer bottleneck

America needs more stuff. Despite being a land of plenty, the country lacks the workers, homes, energy, and logistical capacity it needs to help future generations thrive. This has been the primary factor behind the so-called abundance agenda that has become popular over the past year.

The need for more stuff was caused by boomers' relentless starving of the economy. And even now, the boomer-driven solution to our problems focuses more on sacrifice and deprivation than on expanding supply. Beyond a few interventions in the oil market by the Biden administration, the federal government has largely responded to inflation through Federal Reserve rate hikes. Rate hikes, at their core, are about restricting the economy by reducing demand. They make loans, investment, and housing more expensive — putting the economy on a diet instead of growing the pie.

Tackling the fundamental problems facing our economy isn't just a matter of becoming more efficient or trying to make do with less. It means changing our communities' composition: accepting more immigrants, accommodating more neighbors, and prioritizing investments that grow the economy instead of companies' bottom lines. Economically, these changes are no-brainers. Culturally and politically, though, they require confronting a large and powerful demographic's deeply held feelings about the way things ought to be.

[Derby]

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/airbnb-announces-job-cuts-lays-off-30-recruiting-staff-3836822

Airbnb Lays Off 30% Recruiting Staff: Report

The job cuts affected 0.4 per cent of the Airbnb's total workforce of 6,800.

Home rental firm Airbnb has laid off 30 per cent of its recruiting staff this week, according to a report in Bloomberg. The job cuts affected 0.4 per cent of the company's total workforce of 6,800. A company spokesperson told the outlet, "We've become a leaner and more focused company over the last three years. The company expects to grow its headcount this year."

The spokesperson added the company had made a "difficult decision to reorganize and reduce the size of our recruiting team to reflect our hiring projections."

Airbnb added that it is not an indication of more widespread layoffs. In contrast to the 11 per cent growth experienced last year, the company predicted staff growth in the range of 2 per cent to 4 per cent in 2023. Airbnb also plans to expand its overall headcount this year.
 
While many of its competitors have reduced their growth projections due to increased borrowing rates and a slowdown in the entire industry, Airbnb has been one of the few IT companies to avoid major layoffs. In the meanwhile, as demand for travel increased following the pandemic, the travel industry mostly remained resilient.

Last month, the company reported its first annual profit, with revenue surging in the final three months of 2022 as travel bookings rebounded. The home-rental platform said it made a profit of $319 million in the final quarter of last year on revenue of nearly $2 billion.

According to the San Francisco-based corporation, they ended 2022 with a net income of $1.9 billion as opposed to a deficit of $352 million the previous year.

During the pandemic, Airbnb had laid off 25 per cent of its workforce or about 1,900 employees. The decision was made when the rental major's operations virtually ceased due to global constraints brought on by the Covid-19.  Brian Chesky, the CEO of the company said in a blog post at the time that "global travel came to a standstill" as the Covid-19 induced crisis unfolded.