Rafael Bostic

All those things mean that a single monthly job number today actually is sending a different signal than it sent a year ago.

Sorry, explain that a little bit.

Why?

Sure, because...

There's a relationship between the number of workers, the amount of capital you have, and what that means for output.

And if you want to think about the strength of the economy, if you want to think about the total productive potential of the economy, you need to understand how labor and capital come together to produce goods.

Now, if the labor supply is down, then you don't have enough workers.

You don't have just numbers of workers to produce.

So that's going to bring down your productive capacity.

If you have technology that...

that counters that, then with that lower number of workers, you can actually get to higher outcomes and higher outputs.

So then the low number of workers is not a signal of weakness.

And so we need to be thinking about how all these things fit together.

We have a labor market, I think, where there's a lot of uncertainty.

And when I talk to businesses, they don't tell me that they're going to lay off a ton of people they're worried about

their workforce.

Because of uncertainty.

Right.

Because they think there's technology that might be able to replace some of that stuff.

So that not hiring is not a sign that they're weak, right?