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Comment by AlexanderDhoore | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone show me statistical evidence that this "great resignation" is anything more than a story made up by the media?

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To add a little color to the bare link already posted:

Back in 2000 the Department of Labor started tracking the number of people quitting their job. The number has bounced between 1.5 and 2.5 percent during that time. The number recently went up to 3 percent, and is staying high.

From that it appears "something" is happening. Given the lack of historical data it is impossible to tell if it is normal variability or something interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation

The plural of anecdote is not data, but my employer has definitely felt this. In the last year they've lost approximately 25% of empoyees (who were very long-term, not temps and young people only) to retirement and job moves, which is extremely high compared to baseline.

The BLS's records of the labor force participation rate alone are pretty intense. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

Graphs with zoomed in Y axes make eyeballing often misleading. Consider the data:

2000-2016: -4.3% LFPR

2016-2020: +1% LFPR

Current: 0.2% below what we were in September 2015 (while currently in a sharply increasing trend)

The graph is eye popping, but the numbers themselves don't seem particularly exceptional.

I mean, we celebrate when GDP growth rates hit 3 percent, and here we show a 4 percent decline in the workforce that generates that GDP so I don't think it's that misleading, perhaps as a lucky coincidence. Travelling 7 years in time is a rather huge deal.

Really, where this chart is misleading is that there are likely different cohorts. If stratified by decade of birth I would expect boomers to be most of the difference, and maybe even millenials offsetting it. And if so, there are at least two great resignation stories to tell:

1. Boomers resigning, as long predicted. in the 2008 crisis everyone expected them to retire but that didn't really happen. maybe happened this time

2. The rest of us resigning one job to start another, filling the vacancies created by story #1, and creating its own cycle of job hopping for salary bumps.

>Boomers resigning, as long predicted.

Changes are probably at the margins but those can still be significant in the aggregate. There are obviously many people (of all generations) that can't afford to just pack it. But there are also a lot of Boomers, among others, who--thanks in part to a long bull market--don't have to keep working and there are a lot of reasons to imagine why now might be as good a time as any to wind down full-time employment.

Here's some data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

I'm not gonna claim anything here but do agree what firms / business are mostly complaining about is key employees changing jobs more so than leaving the workforce entirely.

In professional circles, maybe you see some people retiring sooner than they would otherwise would have. Don't know. I haven't really seen that myself though. [ADDED: That's not really true in healthcare. I had two primary care doctors retire on me over the course of a year.] Certainly I've seen a fair bit of motion among fairly senior employees between companies but I don't know how it compares to the baseline.

What anecdotally is the case is that there are a lot of staffing issues for service sector jobs.

> In professional circles, maybe you see some people retiring sooner than they would otherwise would have.

Mother was working as a teacher for over 40 years. A real teacher by calling. Kids loved her, always got the most flowers and chocolades etc.

Unfortunately she had to retire prematurely because the work conditions became terrible.

Goverment wants you to do more and more for the same pay. On top of that ppl quit and you have to fill in for them too. Slowly the situation will resemble retail sector.

Healthcare and Education are the two sections we should NEVER be cheap on.

Unfortunately our rulers dont see that.

America spends more per Capita than any other nation.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/236541/per-capita-health...

Sports stadiums and elite coaches, and doctors' third summer homes don't pay for themselves.

It is primarily to keep the populace "under-educated" to keep them on the "universal basic income" and remove all motivation to "work".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation

Maybe you should put forward an affirmative argument of non-existence or continuity with the past, etc. Otherwise, you are just asserting formless skepticism -- with no evidence.

Skepticism is appropriate when there's no evidence, in general. No opinion on this matter.

Hmm; I think of it more as the null hypothesis - it is the alternative/proposed hypothesis that would need evidence in my mind. I.e. my daily necessary-for-sanity assumption is that 10 million gazillion things are pretty much the same today as yesterday; if a headline/claim is "This thing has changed/Occurred!", that is what needs evidence in order for claim to be relevant/substantiated/interesting.

Or just google it.

Do you have any evidence of this?

I think so many layoffs happened in 2020, and there haven’t been as many layoffs since. Resignations look huge in comparison.

It doesn't even really make sense as a concept. People resign from their jobs and then what? Maybe a small extra portion of the elderly retire early and a small portion become stay at home parents. The rest find new jobs.

The "Great Resignation" name is fearmongering, meant to make people think something bad is happening. Unemployment is at rock bottom; people aren't quitting, they are moving to new jobs. That is just the free market at work. Yet for some reason the "free market ooh rah" people seem the most upset about it.

great musical chairs

I think this is closer to the truth. People are changing jobs, changing careers, going back to school, etc. more frequently. But I don't buy the narrative that people are just dropping out and living the van life or whatever. At least not in significant numbers.

It's the result of moronic short-sighted managers and HR departments that would rather pay replacements 50% more than the existing employee than to give the existing employee the 25% pay bump necessary to keep them.

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