Photo via energepic.com on Pexels

Although recession fears and missed earnings expectations have led to job cuts in some industries, the Great Resignation is still going strong: as of the beginning of June 2022, Americans were still quitting their jobs at record rates, and data from the a global survey by Price Waterhouse Coopers found that up to 20% of workers worldwide were planning to quit their jobs by the end of 2022. Further, the Great Resignation is starting to spread to sectors like academia, which have long been believed to be more stable (however far that belief is from the reality of most of the sector’s workers). With all that in mind, we are back with the second half of our Great Resignation episode. This time around we’re talking about factors that influence quitting, lying flat, labor costs, worker-management relations, and where we go from here. We hope you enjoy!

Before we get to the show notes: We have a shiny new home! Come over to catch up on all of those older episodes that we’ve mentioned (like the ones about money or [side] hustle culture), listen to new ones as they’re released, and read articles and blog posts from the intersection of money, society, and everyday life.

Mentioned on the show

Toxic work culture and the Great Resignation (Sloan Review; MIT)

Pew Research survey on the reasons that people quit their jobs

On lying flat : Chinese millennials are opting out of a lot of the trappings of “adulthood” (The Daily Beast)

The rise of the anti-work movement (BBC Worklife)

A Chinese high court has ruled that 9-9-6 culture should be illegal. What does this mean for workers? (TechCrunch)

Cost of labor: what is it? (Investopedia)

The Great Resignation shows that managers need unions, too (New Republic)

Bonus content

The Great Resignation is older than the pandemic, and its causes are complex (Harvard Business Review)

Why do we work too much? (The New Yorker)

Who is Max Weber and what is the Protestant Work Ethic? [BBC 4 ; Video]

An episode

NB: This one got long, so there’s going to be a part two.

Mentioned in the show:

Flipping the News

The Trump organization gets fired by its accountant, who also declared all of the financial statements it prepared for the organization “unreliable”

2 New York District Attorneys working on the Trump fraud investigation in Manhattan have resigned (from the New York Times)

The Guardian’s reporting on the SwissLeaks scandal. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has created a hub collecting data pertaining to the scandal by person and country as well as reporting from the international group of organizations and journalists who worked on this story.

Main Event

Why do we work? (from Quartz)

Meaning at work is so important that 9 out of 10 people wouldl take a pay cut to do a job that they find fulfilling (from Harvard Business Review)

What is the Great Resignation? (from Texas A&M Today, contains a profile of Anthony C. Klotz and his insights into possible reasons for the Great Resignation)

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Quit rates (overall and by region and industry)

A couple of articles on long COVID and returning to work (or not)/ the economic distress faced by those struggling with long COVID [Time/The Washington Post]. Also of interest: Ed Yong’s reporting for The Atlantic on how immunocompromised and/or disabled people are being overlooked as things (including offices) open back up.

Lack of childcare and the Great Resignation (Washington Post)

Research from the Columbia School of Professional Studies finds that misalignment between an employer and their employees’ personal values is increasingly a big deal for workers.

The Black Death and Labor Shortages

Photo by Bruno Figueiredo on Unsplash

Taxes took center stage at the Met Gala recently, when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) attended the event wearing a white gown with “TAX THE RICH” emblazoned on the back in red. The ensuing discussion was wide ranging, covering everything from the designer’s background to Ocasio-Cortez’s salary and net worth and the ethics of politicians attending the Met Gala at all. There were even articles that worked the dress into a wider discussion of the Democratic party’s tax plan. Whatever you think about the dress, politicians attending museum galas in general, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez specifically, the message was clear and called attention to a real issue: the fact that the amount of tax some of us pay relative to the money we make doesn’t seem to add up. Further driving this point home is the recent release of the Pandora papers, the largest release of offshore financial information in history which shows how wealthy individuals from all over the world store their wealth and set up trusts in places like the Cayman Islands or South Dakota (yes, it turns out that South Dakota is a major tax haven), where it’s less subject to what they view as “unfavorable” taxation.

Speaking of taxes and things that don’t add up, that brings us to the subject of this episode: we’re talking about the tax gap, that is the yawning void between how much tax is owed and how much tax gets paid to the IRS. Where does the tax gap come from (hint: not always where you think)? Why are some people so reluctant to pay their fair share, despite having more than enough money to do so? We also take a detour into dynastic wealth, moral millionaires, and what money does to our brains.

Mentioned on the show:

Millionaires asking billionaires to pay emergency taxes

ProPublica’s The Secret IRS Files series of stories on the taxes of the ultra wealthy, including an article about how and why they conducted their reporting.

Abigail Disney on what wealthy families teach their children about holding onto dynastic wealth.

How the “famliy fund” loophole make its easier to avoid paying taxes

Kelly Phillips Erb talks to Brookings Institute Senior Fellow Steve