Many tech giants have made huge layoffs recently. What's going on here? Does this spell the end of the era of tech growth and what will happen next?
This is all regression toward the mean. The next couple years should be interesting.
A pity for those who enjoyed the calm of the last two years!
Some comment I read recently (but I can’t find) put it in terms like “Meta spent 36 billion to make secondlife for the wii”
For a given technology you can only sensibly produce a product of complexity X, beyond which it scales at some awful exponential rate, so throwing more labor at the problem rarely works because the organizational coordination costs scale up faster than the productivity gains.
Speculation, but the "dollar milkshake theory" seems to fit the best here, which would imply we'll probably be stuck with high interest rates for quite awhile. It's entirely possibly we never see money move as freely as it did in the past 10 years in our lifetime.
I agree with your speculation, I do not see the money as free flowing as it once was. Anecdotally, I was recently given a worst interest rate in 2023 with a better credit score, and more income than I had in 2015.
I think you're reading too many cranks on the internet. The state of the economy is fine, significantly stronger than where it was just 3 years ago. Real consumer spending hasn't budged much and the labor market is the strongest in 50 years despite the well publicized layoffs.
The dotcom boom happened under equivalent to higher interest rates than we had now. "Morning in America" happened with an unemployment rate double what it is today.