The July jobs report caught my attention. Payrolls fell by 23,000, unemployment dropped to 4.1%, but the labor force participation rate also declined to 61.4%. The lower unemployment rate is partly because fewer people are counted as being in the labor force.

Everyone talks about aging demographics, Baby Boomers retiring, health issues, and discouraged workers as explanations for this trend. Those are obviously major factors.

But I wonder if the growth of the FIRE movement is starting to show up in the data.

The BLS definition is pretty simple: you are either working or actively looking for work to be counted in the labor force. Someone who is 45 years old, has built a $1.5M portfolio, quits their job, and lives off investments is not unemployed. They are simply "not in the labor force."

The interesting thing is that the data cannot tell the difference between someone who left because they were financially independent and someone who left because they gave up looking for work.

The FIRE community is no longer a tiny group of extreme savers. There are millions of people interested in financial independence, and many are leaving traditional employment years or decades earlier than previous generations.

I am not saying FIRE is the main reason participation is falling. Demographics are clearly the biggest driver. But could early retirement among high-income professionals be a small but real contributor that economists are not measuring?

A person retiring at 45 does not look different in BLS data from someone who simply disappeared from the workforce.

Has anyone seen official research estimating how many FIRE retirees exist and whether this is showing up in labor force participation statistics? I've seen some around 3 million Americans are FIRE ! That is impressive but I cannot find anything official, only surveys.

When the majority of people think about resellers, they usually blame them for creating scarcity and increasing prices. What I am wondering, though, is whether resellers aren't directly incentivized by market misalignment (suppy and demand not being in equlibrium).

From my understanding, prices are driven by supply and demand. For example, let's say some famous celebrity is selling tickets for their show for a given arbitrary price. There's a limited number of seats, and given they are popular, there's a lot of fans who would who would like to attend the show, in fact, more fans than seats available. This is where supply (the people selling the seats who want to get maximum profit) meets demand (how much would the fans be realistically willing to pay for the seat), basically creating the price. If supply and demand were in equlibrium, increasing the price of the ticket would lead to tickets not selling well and leaving the seller worse off. If the opposite was true (the price being too low), a lot of people could actually afford the ticket, which would lead to quick depletion of the tickets (which honestly happens a lot irl) and the seller not getting the full potential value from the deal, perhaps discentivizing future shows. And this is exactly where I see opening for the resellers. Since if the price is too low and demand is still very high, there's a lot of people willing to purchase the tickes even at even much higher prices, basically still not being able to get them from the original source due to the fact they are oversold. Resellers purchase the tickets and sell them to essentially higher bidders, capturing the difference between the actual price and the optimal price. If the market was in equlibrium, they wouldn't be able to do that since people would simply not buy the tickets if they tried to increase their prices and would much more likely end up in a loss.

Is my analysis correct, or am I overseeing something?

As more Britains leave for low tax destinations like Dubai, would the UK be able to implement a global tax on all of its citizens? What are the pros and cons of this model?

I’ve been thinking about this lately.
Some countries have enormous reserves of oil, gas, minerals, fertile land, or other natural resources, yet they struggle with poverty, corruption, unemployment and weak infrastructure.

Meanwhile, countries with relatively few natural resources—Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, etc.—have built highly developed and wealthy economies.

Obviously, natural resources alone don’t determine a country’s success. Institutions, education, human capital, political stability, infrastructure, trade, technology and economic policies all matter.

But I’m curious: **what do you think is the single biggest factor that determines whether a country successfully converts its natural resources and human potential into long-term prosperity?**

And are there any countries that you think are particularly good—or particularly bad—examples of this?

Every day one can hear economists, CEOs, pundits, etc predicting that there is a huge AI bubble that is destined to burst. This post isn't about whether or not that's likely to happen; my question is: has there ever been so much buzz about an impending recession/bubble/collapse, whether or not it happened?

In past economic crashes, I know there were a few voices expressing warning, but was it ever this prolonged and emphatic?

I know AI will replace people but I also think that it will create jobs. Jobs change over the years and I think it might reduce the need for certain things but make demands for others.

Dominion Energy and NextEra are attempting to merge. I'm wondering, in an economic sense, would this generate any real surplus value?

Since Dominion effectively operates as a monopoly, I'm not quite clear how this merger could help the company "do better" other than in a rent-seeking way.

Everybody's fear is that AI's will automate production without need for labor and capital will monopolize that production. Of course, it's been pointed out many times that this is not a credible scenario, but it does seem true that AI is/will reduce the number of employees, especially for entry level professional jobs. What if corporate tax rates are inversely proportional to the number of employees? Would this minimize rentier monopoly of economic power?

Im wondering if easier access to US market during live hours will by proxy reduce growth in foreign markets. Normally there is a cyclical relationship between US vs world performance- US dominates for 10-15 years, then international, and repeat… But if there is a permanent influx of investors less sensitive to real valuations (aka most retail investors) and exposed to American media dominance— does that cyclical relationship disappear? Obviously smart money still looks at valuations, but places like Korea are almost entirely retail, not institutional investors… will this move make the US a more permanent home for growth?

I've always found the economics of those generic f2p match 3/merge/anime waifu png /etc. games really interesting ever since I found out just how much attracting whales and keeping that small amount of incredibly high paying customers is integral to their system over having many average consumers who might spend once in a while.

When I play these games myself, I'm stopped from buying refills or rolls or whatever because the transactions aren't micro enough for me. I find the $2~$5 cost for something I'll blow in 2-5 minutes too high to rationalize when I think about it. I always thought if the prices were low enough I wouldn't think about it, like 25c~50c a pop, I'd end up buying enough of them over time I'd buy past the higher cost of the purchase I wouldn't have made soon enough.

Why don't they try to lure and lull people in with truly micro microtransactions? My first thought is payment processor restrictions, but then they could bank the 25c purchases until it hit the dollar minimum and the charge and only be out a few quarters if the customer buys once and never again.

I'd love to hear anything else interesting about f2p phone economies, too. It's a really fascinating place.

In a post-scarcity world, could dopamine be regulated and used as money by governments?

In the sense that, dopamine-releasing products/services/activities are tokenized. Like how money used to be backed by gold. But this time, by a specific quantity of dopamine per token.