I get unemployment being high for office-based jobs right now, companies think they can slap AI onto everything and get rid of employees, but what’s the reason for min wage jobs? Are they suddenly overflowing with applicants?
I believe the changes have more to do with US tax laws which have made it harder for companies to write off R&D. Companies might say it’s due to AI to put an investor-friendly spin on it.
I’m biased and it worries me that the above is also what I’d like to believe, rather it being than a permanent tightening of the screws on SWEs. We could test the hypothesis to see if the same trends happened in other countries (like Canada) who didn’t change their tax policies.
It doesn't make it harder to "write off R&D"; it stops bullshit accounting practices by tech firms and forces them to capitalise and depreciate rather than expense stuff that is obviously capital in nature (unless you think code is ephemeral and needs to be rewritten daily).
The problem is code is a lot more context sensitive than most capital expenditures. If I pay for a machine that makes really good chalk, then when my company eventually folds that machine is still probably worth a fair amount to my competitors. In contrast, the code I wrote today which probably is going to save my company ~200 man/hours a year is almost certainly completely and utterly worthless to literally anyone else, because it automates a hyperspecific piece of a company-specific workflow.
Min wage jobs are in the service industry which will take a hit from people pulling back on discretionary spending. Is it one of those "because people think there might be a recession, they manifest one" things?
Seems like it isn't. The last few years have been really good for the bottom of the income/wealth distribution.
Tbh with the federal deficit at 6-7% of GDP I think it'll be somewhat hard to produce a recession. Eventually companies will figure out the shoe isn't going to drop and start hiring again.
