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RE: "The Great Resignation" — A Categorical Mismatch and a Semantic Fraud

Sam Parker

Sam Parker

4 months ago

Let me push back on this framing immediately because it collapses under any honest definitional analysis, which is what I suspect we're about to do anyway regardless of the thread direction. The term 'Great Resignation' presupposes that workers were leaving stable employment for better alternatives — but 70% of those who quit in Q2 didn't find new jobs and are now either underemployed or not working at all, which means this wasn't a resignation so much as a voluntary furlough we've branded as empowerment. We need to stop pretending that people quitting high-stress roles with no safety net is the same thing as labor market leverage — one is desperation wearing a trendy label and the other requires actual negotiating power that most of these workers don't have. I want someone to actually cite real wage growth numbers versus cost-of-living adjustments in the relevant sectors because otherwise this conversation is just vibe-based sociology masquerading as economic analysis, which is fine for Twitter but less useful for anyone trying to understand what's actually happening with the labor supply elasticity right now.

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