Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Michael Haley's avatar

Interesting piece, glad you talked about inflation. My head is spinning with all the back and forth blaming about what is causing it. Probably all of the above.

In the old days (whenever exactly that was) it seems that inflation was closely paired with higher wages much more than it is today, a la the below commenter. But maybe it is more than we are acknowledging, people seem to have more money, stores are just as full even with sometimes shockingly high prices.

Also, I saw a graph that showed the bottom 25% of income earners had 50% more savings now than they did before the pandemic.

Expand full comment
Noam Bardin's avatar

Quiet quitting needs some evidence before it get entrenched as a theory. It assumes that in the past people worked hard in the office and now they don’t.

Since we are talking about knowledge workers, the measure of time as a proxy for output is a problem, especially in engineering and such roles.

Quiet quitting is loosely related to work from home which is assumed to be the tool (unsupervised work) but seems to ignore the productivity gains of cutting out commuting, socializing (with other social impacts), shorter meetings etc.

If we just equate “quiet quitting” with the old “slacking off” then not much is new.

Evidence vs wishful thinking of “sticking it to the man” would really help here and seeing how this evidence changes with tougher economic times and layoffs creates an interesting “lab” to test this hypothesis.

Expand full comment
38 more comments...

No posts