Reflections from my first month of unemployment
Being kicked out of the tech industry - Jacky Alciné
After 250 job applications in four months, I'm giving up.
a simple (local) solution to the pay gap — wingolog
wingolog: article: a simple (local) solution to the pay gap
I was laid off by Atlassian
AI layoffs are looking more and more like corporate fiction that's masking a darker reality, Oxford Economics suggests | Fortune
"Firms don't appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale," the firm said. It suspects some are trying to "dress up layoffs" as good news.
What the Challenger Layoff Tracker Really Measures
Why announced layoffs often diverge from the government’s layoff data.
Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges
Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom (2017, The New Press) is simply excellent. Here's an excerpt, here's Dr. McMillan Cottom's page about the book, here's … | Cogito, Ergo Sumana | Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Why I'm Worried About Job Loss + Thoughts on Comparative Advantage — LessWrong
David Oks published a well-written essay yesterday arguing that the current panic about AI job displacement is overblown. I agree with a few of his p…
The Hidden Tax on Blue-Collar Workers and Building in America
The unemployment insurance system has a design flaw that penalizes the construction industry, leading to fewer workers and lower productivity. Over time, that means less – and more expensive – housing.
Distinguishing Labor from Work - Aaron Ross Powell
We should get rid of the former, if we can, but we should absolutely keep the latter.
Companies Are Blaming AI for Layoffs. The Real Reason Will Piss You Off.
180,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2025. Companies say it’s because of AI. Oxford researchers call BS.
Ubisoft Embargoes Journalists Reporting On Latest Round Of Layoffs
This is not typically what embargoes are for
Interviews with Failed & Successful Startup Founders
+200 interviews with the brains behind shut down and active startups. Learn from their wins and their mistakes and become a better founder.
Work is a cult, here's how to escape
Consumer Spending during Unemployment: Positive and Normative Implications
Using de-identified bank account data, we show that spending drops sharply at the large and predictable decrease in income arising from the exhaustion of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We use the high-frequency response to a predictable income decline as a new test to distinguish between alternative consumption models. The sensitivity of spending to income we document is inconsistent with rational models of liquidity-constrained households, but is consistent with behavioral models with present-biased or myopic households. Depressed spending after exhaustion also implies that the consumption-smoothing gains from extending UI benefits are four times larger than from raising UI benefit levels. (JEL D14, D91, E21, E24, E70, J65)
Do Employers Have More Monopsony Power in Slack Labor Markets?
This article confronts monopsony theory’s predictions regarding workers’ wages with observed wage patterns over the business cycle. Using German administrative data for the years 1985 to 2010 and an estimation framework based on duration models, the authors construct a time series of the labor supply elasticity to the firm and estimate its relationship to the unemployment rate. They find that firms possess more monopsony power during economic downturns. Half of this cyclicality stems from workers’ job separations being less wage driven when unemployment rises, and the other half mirrors that firms find it relatively easier to poach workers. Results show that the cyclicality is more pronounced in tight labor markets with low unemployment, and that the findings are robust to controlling for time-invariant unobserved worker or plant heterogeneity. The authors further document that cyclical changes in workers’ entry wages are of similar magnitude as those predicted under pure monopsonistic wage setting.
