Two Good Reads: The Great Resignation And The Other America

I’ll keep this short. This essay from the Von Mises Institute was republished at Zerohedge this afternoon:

Vaccine Mandates & 'The Great Resignation': The Media Pretends There's No Connection

Authored by Liam Cosgrove via The Mises Institute,

Let me be clear from the start: I do not know the degree to which vaccine mandates have played a role in the massive voluntary exodus from the workforce. 

What Cosgrove is talking about is the great exodus of workers from the workforce—and the fact that the MSM, and especially the “prestige press”, resolutely refuses to even consider whether this patent phenomenon is related to injection mandates. After discussing this Great Refusal to look at the evidence, Cosgrove presents two examples of data that deserve to be discussed in the context of the injection mandates:

Now, let’s discuss the awfully interesting correlations between the announcements of vaccine mandates and the “Great Resignation”:

The US has clocked two consecutive all-time highs for the percentage of workers quitting within a single month, 2.9 percent for August and 3.0 percent for September (data released on a two-month delay). This coincided precisely with an onset of highly prominent vaccine mandate announcements within the private and public sectors, one of the earliest being Google on July 28, which inspired a tsunami of corporate signaling throughout the month of August. In a similar fashion, California set the trend for a series of state-level mandates, most of which were announced in August, with enforcement to begin in late September and October. August was indeed the first month in which this topic seeped into mainstream public discourse, the buzz increasing in September as Joe Biden announced the mandate for federal employees.

Right off the bat this seems like a coincidence worth mentioning, yet none of the outlets listed above did. But there’s more. Historically upswings in resignations have correlated with commensurate upswings in hiring (see chart below). As businesses hire more, workers have freedom to shop around. However, we are not seeing that this time around, with total hires increasing by 7.5 percent between March and September 2021 and quits increasing by 24.3 percent during that same period, a threefold margin.

Now, let’s pivot to look at two states that are handling mandates very differently—Colorado enacted one of the strictest vaccine mandates while Arizona became the first state to enact a private sector ban on vaccine mandates. Colorado subsequently broke its all-time record for highest quit rate ever recorded with 3.4 percent. To quote the Denver Post:

What is unusual about the new record high is that it coincides with a still relatively high 5.9 percent unemployment rate in Colorado in August. Normally, elevated unemployment and people voluntarily jumping ship don’t go hand in hand.

For example, when Colorado’s unemployment rate was at 5.9 percent in January 2003, the quit rate was 2.6 percent and it was 2.7 percent in January 2014, another month with 5.9 percent unemployment.

In September, Colorado shattered this record with an adjusted quit rate of 4.3 percent (raw rate of 4.7 percent)! Meanwhile, Arizona was one of only four states to experience a decline in their raw quit rate moving from July to August, and it did so by the greatest margin. The raw rate continued to decline in September. So, out of fifty states, Arizona is demonstrating some of the strongest data contrary to the Great Resignation trend.

It seems compelling to me. Follow the link for more discussion.

And here’s an article at The Atlantic that’s an enjoyable, rather upbeat, read:

Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID

Outside the world inhabited by the professional classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over.

Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning of the article, to give you a flavor:

I am old enough to remember the good old days when holiday-advice pieces were all variations on “How to Talk to Your Tea Party Uncle About Obamacare.” As Christmas approaches, we can look forward to more of this sort of thing, with the meta-ethical speculation advanced to an impossibly baroque stage of development. Is it okay for our 2-year-old son to hug Grandma at a Christmas party if she received her booster only a few days ago? Should the toddler wear a mask except when he is slopping mashed potatoes all over his booster seat? Our oldest finally attended her first (masked) sleepover with other fully vaccinated 10-year-olds, but one of them had a sibling test positive at day care. Should she stay home or wear a face shield? What about Omicron?

I don’t know how to put this in a way that will not make me sound flippant: No one cares. Literally speaking, I know that isn’t true, because if it were, the articles wouldn’t be commissioned. But outside the world inhabited by the professional and managerial classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many, if not most, Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over, and they have been for a long while.

I liked this paragraph, too:

The CDC recommends that all adults get a booster shot; I do not know a single person who has received one. When I read headlines like “Here’s Who May Need a Fourth COVID-19 Vaccine Dose,” I find myself genuinely reeling. Wait, there are four of them now? I would be lying if I said I knew what all the variants were or what differences exist between them. (They all sound like the latest entry in some down-market action franchise: Tom Clancy’s Delta Variant: A Jack Ryan Novel, Transformers 4: Rise of the Omicron.) COVID is invisible to me except when I am reading the news, in which case it strikes me with all the force of reports about distant coups in Myanmar.

I read somewhere recently that a survey showed that something like a third of Americans continue to live in terror, while the rest just want to get on with their lives. That sounds about right.