Collective Conscious

Econ­browser has a look at the dif­fer­ence between the old reces­sion and the new reces­sion, and finds it has quite a bit to do with the new shape of the econ­omy. In short, we’re look­ing at a reces­sion in which employ­ees get fired, or have their hours reduced, rather than being “laid off” — that is, employ­ers are sev­er­ing their con­nec­tion to spe­cific work­ers when times get bad.

This is costly. Both work­ers and employ­ers are going to have to spend a lot of time over the next few years re-​​matching to each other, rather than sim­ply pick­ing up old busi­ness rela­tion­ships where they left off. No won­der unem­ploy­ment pro­jec­tions look like this:

I expect that this change is a con­tin­u­a­tion of a long-​​term cul­tural trend away from “career” employ­ment and towards a life­long series of “jobs”.