A giant paradox has burgeoned in the economy, and it’s vexing even the experts: A tight labor market, replete with booming hiring…alongside slowed growth, recession warnings, and crashing productivity. Tyler Cowen, the George Mason economics professor and influential blogger at Marginal Revolution, has a theory that could explain it all, as he wrote for Bloomberg Opinion on Tuesday: There’s a “serious crisis of morale” in the post-pandemic workplace.
Maybe workers “really are doing less,” Cowen wrote. That accounts for the unprecedented mix of economic data we’ve been seeing. In other words, it wasn’t just Elon Musk’s imagination: Everyone’s quiet-quitting at the same time.
