• Emily Stewart is a writer for Vox who wrote a piece about how widespread layoffs in the tech and media sectors don’t necessarily foretell broader problems in the economy.
• The next day, Vox Media announced layoffs of approximately 7% of the company’s staff, which some people used as an opportunity to dunk on Stewart.
• Stewart points out that the widespread attention given to the Vox layoffs illustrates her point.
• She explains that the media industry is an extreme outlier in terms of attention paid versus objective economic significance.
• Stewart notes that there has never been a month that didn’t feature a million people losing their jobs, and that since the pandemic settled down, we’ve been in a two-year period of structurally low layoffs.
• She also points out that big tech companies have been super-sizing at an incredible pace, and that now that they’re contracting, lots of places would like to hire engineers.
• Stewart suggests that the upside of the layoffs is that it will make it easier for people who have startup ideas to get them off the ground, and that it will also make it easier for government agencies to use signing bonuses and other private sector tactics to attract and retain labor.
Published January 30, 2023
Visit Slow Boring to read Matthew Yglesias’s original post Recent layoffs at Big Tech don’t spell economic doom
