You may be right on the negative real yield. My thinking was that, ceteris paribus, if expected inflation is rising I would expect interest rates to rise as well. QE has likely been playing a large role in muting this effect.
I'm honestly surprised inflation hasn't been worse than what we've already seen. 10-year treasury yields are still well below their 2019 levels and are currently below their levels from Q2 of this year.
I think part of the problem is that many companies hire external staffing companies and expect them to find the "perfect candidate", and not someone who is "good enough". This combined with the Great Resignation means that both candidates and employers are likely being extremely picky with who they choose hire / work for. As someone who was recently on the market, it was rather strange to see so many companies desperate for talent whilst also being frustratingly meticulous with hiring decisions. I made the joke to myself that companies are being far pickier with their next hires at the moment than most people are with their romantic partners. The arbitrage opportunities in the market for human capital right now are just staggering.
The argument, at least to me, appears to lean heavily on a false dichotomy: You can either be smart, have good ideas, or some blend of the two. Yet he begins with a counter-example in the case of Einstein.
I remember watching a YouTube video from The Wall Street Journal where they had configured 100 bot accounts to essentially crawl TikTok to study how it develops profiles for each user. For most users it may seem rather innocent, but in the video the user was modeled to be someone struggling with depression and towards the end of the simulation was being fed mostly depressing content.
I think recommendation engines can be useful for discovering content, but using gradient descent to do this can also be extremely dangerous. There is seemingly no control for when the recommended content is slowly pushing someone towards self-harm or other acts of violence.