Perhaps we're seeing something with the "soft landing" that's simply never been observed before, since there's never really been a soft landing.
First, imagine the soft landing period as if it were a "recession-in-all-but-name". What would that look like? Well, inflation would surge. Obviously we can't have growth dip below zero, or it becomes a recession. And jobs would probably not go negative either. No, what we observed was that everyone just kind of muddled along until we got on the other side of it.
I think you and Drum are right that the productivity evidence is consistent with the overall turnover hypothesis. Sure, certain demographics might be doing better or worse, but the net impact is that with the economy doing "just so-so" during high inflation and at tight job market, we're really just churning a lot of low-productivity jobs into high-productivity ones. It's a game of musical chairs where the game-master keeps removing shitty old chairs and replacing them with brand-new ones. Not everyone gets the best chair -- the slow people still end up with worse chairs, many slow people quit and a lot of new fast people show up on the scene -- but everyone ends up with a chair they're more suited to than before, so net "enjoyment", AKA productivity, goes UP.
Other than that... I also kind of wonder if some of this is just the housing construction industry waking from its long slumber, leaner, meaner, and greener. A blunting of housing costs would register as a "productivity" bump.
Perhaps we're seeing something with the "soft landing" that's simply never been observed before, since there's never really been a soft landing.
First, imagine the soft landing period as if it were a "recession-in-all-but-name". What would that look like? Well, inflation would surge. Obviously we can't have growth dip below zero, or it becomes a recession. And jobs would probably not go negative either. No, what we observed was that everyone just kind of muddled along until we got on the other side of it.
I think you and Drum are right that the productivity evidence is consistent with the overall turnover hypothesis. Sure, certain demographics might be doing better or worse, but the net impact is that with the economy doing "just so-so" during high inflation and at tight job market, we're really just churning a lot of low-productivity jobs into high-productivity ones. It's a game of musical chairs where the game-master keeps removing shitty old chairs and replacing them with brand-new ones. Not everyone gets the best chair -- the slow people still end up with worse chairs, many slow people quit and a lot of new fast people show up on the scene -- but everyone ends up with a chair they're more suited to than before, so net "enjoyment", AKA productivity, goes UP.
Other than that... I also kind of wonder if some of this is just the housing construction industry waking from its long slumber, leaner, meaner, and greener. A blunting of housing costs would register as a "productivity" bump.