Unfortunately, the good jobs number isn’t as good as it seems. Inflation rose more than wages; many of the jobs are low-paying temporary jobs from the World Cup; and many jobs were young people taking care of old people, which while important ethically, don’t increase the productivity of the economy.
At the lower range of the wage scale, businesses have so much leverage over workers that they can suppress wages under competitive market rates. Because of this, an appropriately priced minimum wage doesn’t hurt employment, and actually increases it because more people are willing to work for that higher wage and they are less likely to quit.
The increase in wages results in higher prices and lower profits. The higher prices do not cancel out the wage growth with inflation because only a minority of the cost of all the goods and services people buy are from people who make near the minimum wage.
The workplaces that have grown recently, are ones that tend to employ more women. And, the workplaces that have shrunk, are ones that tend to employ more men.
The big growth happened in private education and health services.
The world has changed. There are fewer traditionally masculine jobs. The culture and politicians glorify these obsolete jobs. This creates a mismatch that leads to bad policy.
Modern farms and factories employ more machines than people. As we get richer, we tend to want more services than hard things.
If we want job growth for men, men will have to do the jobs that are growing. Which they can, but we need to not label these jobs as jobs for women.
Texas put a lot of police in schools to combat mass shootings. As a result, police are enforcing routine student discipline, sometimes violently.
Trump is using the power of the government to attack the person who successfully sued Trump for sexually abusing her.
Scores of people were fired for making critical comments of Charlike Kirk or celebrating his murder. Conservatives said they wanted radical free-speech, and yet they hardly speak out about this like they did about rude protests on college campuses during speeches. The disingenuousness and hypocrisy is amazing.
One woman was fired for making a private Facebook post that said, “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends”. I’m not a fan of that kind of attitude. But, it isn’t a reason to fire someone from their job. She was fired because people complained and demanded she be let go…her employer gave in to an anti-free speech mob. I thought only the woke left did this…
It’s not clear how many layoffs are caused by AI. Companies may want to have layoffs or not hire for business reasons, and just blame it on AI so they don’t look bad.
The job growth was good compared to recent months, but not actually good. The job growth was heavily concentrated in healthcare and social assistance. These are jobs caused by our aging society, but not good underlying economic growth.
The jobs numbers for 2025 were revised, and job growth was very low for 2025.
The Phillipines beat out India on out-sourced phone customer service jobs because Filipinos could speak English with an accent more understandable to Americans.
Korea’s labor laws make firing employees very difficult. These strict laws drew out of the horrible working conditions during Korea’s economic rise under a dictatorship. Making it that hard to fire employees leads to: bad employees lowering companies’ efficiency, companies hiring fewer employees, companies keeping workers as contract employees or independent contractors and the employees therefore not getting basic benefits, brain drain as good employees can more easily move up the ranks and make more money in other countries, and discourages foreign companies from investing in Korea.
“”In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.””