Good Entropy

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Marginal Devolution

Eric S. Raymond writes:

We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and
downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the
minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make
sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly
masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped.
Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables
(alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight
to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the
mildly dysfunctional.

In the comment section:

Jessica Boxer Says:

I propose Boxer’s law of economics: “The economy interprets taxation and regulation as damage and routes around it.”