> I know plenty of people who won’t go back to work at any price

The statement you made is both badly phrased and irrelevant. What you meant is that you know people who wont go back to a previous job for any wage, which is so absurd (and baseless) that it's effectively noise.

How is that baseless? Do you know how many people work part time just for “fun money”

And sone people wouldn’t go back to a previous job at any wage. If you left Twitter and Elon Musk called you personally and offered to double your compensation, would you take him up on the offer?

A tiny fraction of the number of people that work to eat.

In the school system in particular, there are plenty of older people who work in the cafeteria, bus drivers, etc who did it because they just wanted to supplement their retirement or wanted fun money. A lot of them said forget it after Covid. Both for health reasons and lifestyle reasons.

And you didn’t answer the question - is there any amount of money you could be offered to work at Twitter?

I can honestly say that I wouldn’t work for Twitter for any amount. This isn’t because I’m “rich”. But we make enough to be comfortable. Why would I subject myself to that?

Even before I fell into my current role at $BigTech, we had our big house in the burbs in “the good school system” built when I was making only 115K in 2016. Why would I be willing to suffer now that I make twice as much? Making more money wouldn’t affect my lifestyle.

Going from local enterprise dev to working remotely for $BigTech didn’t really change anything in our lifestyle

How do these people pay for their necessities? (Honest question)

- married people whose spouse makes enough where they didn’t have to work and they did it for fun money (like

- people close to retirement and who said “fuck it” I’ e got more important things to do.

How can they afford that?

- close to retirement already

- spouses who work and they didn’t need the extra money.

I have no idea why people think this is so outrageous.

It's a tiny number of people to the point of being irrelevant to the conversation.

Tiny number?

Let me put a bit of context. At least a decade long debate about gender roles and other other related issues has been going on and only intensified, imo given the one sided politically correct stance adopted even by those who deep inside disagree with it has something to do with it.

A lot of separated, divorced couples, who remain alone, but that still leaves millions who likely are sharing a place having the option to reject employment, rely on one source of income and get by. Which may very well be a far better spot to be in than seeing oneself exhausted, poorly taken care of personal matters and still no flowery prospect anyway.

That is not a tiny numbers and is totally relevant to the discussion since the article goes on and on about some figures but provides nada convincing insight about the natures of the changes we are subtly but surely observing. The social aspects are gladly omitted to focus on numbers as if people were hungry state machines operating on dollar to effort/time spent only.

Note: not saying women better not work. Given the nature of jobs it's often perfectly interchangeable and who earns more is likely to be the determinant. At least for couples who are not well off. Those who can opt for the lower income without significant impact to their life style would likely take certain factors in such as the appeal of being able to be a house-huseband and see their partner stressed out to make bucks vs taking that chore off them in exchange of theirs. In either case that's 1 count of off the labour market that's on the table for every two people in a home sharing relationship in the united states.

I would go as far as saying that the precarity many women were put through lately made them twist their mind about singleship and turned to getting in a relationship in order to leave employment altogerher. Even this count wouldn't be so tiny to be discounted, and it's not like surveys will capture the figures.

You mean on a discussion thread about “Where have all American workers gone”?

That kind of is the discussion…

I think the point is that, while it may be empirically relevant to you, it is statistically irrelevant in general.

The overwhelming number of families do not benefit from tech incomes, and actually do require more than one person to contribute to the household income.

Census.gov seems to have a different opinion

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/09/did-covid-19-...

I only have anecdotes but you're describing ~half of my aunts and uncles here. All retired, pushing into their 60s and 70s.

The most extreme example being an uncle who was a PhD Chemist in automotive paints his entire career spent with the same employer and who has a slightly-over 6-figure annual pension. Before COVID-19 he was a door greeter and stocked shelves at a grocery store in the city where he lives. Now? Watches television all day.