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Or, in other words, businesses are losing their viability resulting in lost jobs as they shut down.



>> You can't find any staff willing to do this work for the pay you're offering.

> ...resulting in lost jobs as they shut down

Is a lost job lost if no one wanted it in the first place?

Sounds like one of those "if a tree falls in the forest" things.


well, maybe if the restaurant can't find any waiters, they'll close down and fire the cook. I think that's what the above comment meant with lost jobs.


This. If the business can't sustain itself because of labor costs it's not just those unfilled positions that suffer. If this happens too much you end up with demand for those ancillary jobs that folks are willing to do for market rate but can't find openings for.


And when each filled job goes, that person's wages get taken out of the local economy affecting further businesses.

Now they don't buy lunch or drive and fill up with gas.


If an unfilled job ceases to be advertised, is it really a lost job? When nobody has lost their job?


Maybe it's not a lost job, but it's a lost job opening. It's in the same ballpark.


I'd say it's the opposite. Surely the fact all our working men and women have job offers better than minimum wage, allowing them to better support their families, is something to be celebrated?


> Maybe it's not a lost job, but it's a lost job opening. It's in the same ballpark.

How so?


maybe in the same sense as "opportunity cost"


You mean eliminated jobs. If it's not worth paying for, it's not worth doing.


Not always. Markets are not in fact efficient.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29235395


Not perfectly efficient, but generally pretty efficient, at least when there aren't major externalities unaccounted for.

Yeah, there might be some jobs like carbon capturer where the market is not set up in a way for you to get payed for your service despite its vast value to society.

However in the case of flipping burgers, if people aren't willing to spend enough on a burger to pay the salary of a burger flipper, then clearly the job of burger flipping is not worth doing.


We could argue hypotheticals. I prefer some concreteness.

I'm not finding much by way of specific sectors affected, though healthcare, education, transportation, and hospitality (foodservice, lodgings) are often mentioned.

US Department of Labour has a breakdown by state, showing proportionately more quits in less-populated states:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jltst.nr0.htm

Other sector-based listings seem more classification artefacts than useful information, e.g., https://news.sky.com/story/labour-shortages-which-jobs-are-s...

(What we want isn't a list of openings per classification, but deviation from normal levels of openings, adjusted for total classification size. Stats are ... complicated.)

This listing looks somewhat more substantive, listing Agriculture, Education and Public Safety as leaders in openings: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/11/08/if-you-tho...

One job category that could desperately use greater competene is business and economy journalism. The number of useless articles rehashing opinion and generalities on this topic is too damn high!




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