My dad ran a tech company through the nineties, and periodically after he retired former colleagues would come round for career advice. And one time one guy came round who was prob late thirties around 2002, and the conversation turned to the job market and my dad commented that

...’the labour market hasn’t really been tight since the eighties’. And he told this story about working in the seventies, when a department had handed out about a 6% real terms pay rise, and half the department had spontaneously quit, and all found new jobs in < two weeks.

Imagine running a tech company in the *nineties* and not thinking the labour market was tight for engineers. The seventies were a totally different world for labour market outcomes.

A tight labour market is one where you interview process has to go from CV to offer in a week or you lose your candidates to competitors.

A tight labour market is one where if you don’t offer large pay increases substantial fractions of your workforce spontaneously quit.

We have let the labour market run permenantly slack in for decades and workers have paid the price in substantially worse terms of employment, whether pay, working hours, employee protections. Let’s just drive the labour market so tight the shoe is on the other foot for a while.

If the labour market never gets tight there will never be any inflation so we might as well just keep government cost of capital at zero forever and abandon taxation....

I troll obviously but that degree of pessimism just isn’t warranted. You can always put people to work on capital projects. At -2% real interest rates borrowing people to level mountains to marginally reduce commutes is welfare enhancing.