> So that is two pieces: 1) ZERO is the optimum number of employees for any company, and 2) companies are realizing that they’re paying way too much for giant work forces that are not producing near the value being paid.

Let's step back a bit here. What is the purpose of a company? Profits? if so, short-term or long-term? The real problem, at least in my personal opinion, is that companies in the last 50 or so years have become pure short term profit machines. Especially publicly traded companies. That is not ok, they have become parasites who consume resources on the host country and community they have infected, until the host dies, along with them.

Companies are supposed to have a mutually beneficial relationship, a symbiotic relationship if you will, with the community they reside in. A parasite thinks in terms of short-term gains. Beyond short-term profit, companies should be geared towards creating economic value and wealth around them. They should benefit not just their owners but society as a whole. That way, they become long-term profit generators, generations and centuries later they would continue to benefit their owners and community alike.

The ideal number of employees is not zero, because then that would mean there are no people outside of the company owners that are vested long term in its success. and inevitably, the company becomes a wealth sucking machine, transferring wealth from regular people to company owners.

Naturally, a well run government will snuff out parasitical companies, so long as democracy is in effect. If the government fails to do so, then as is their nature, the parasitism must spread until the people turn on their government.

As for individuals, we should -- in the way of Nash equilibrium -- return the favor and look out for our own benefit and profit and nothing else. never mind helping your company succeed, just find the best way to optimize sucking wealth like a parasite from the company at minimal labor cost to you? That is what we should do right? that's what game theory tells us, and that is how companies are being operated these days. What's good for the geese is good for the employees.

Although, I can't get myself to that point. Not caring about anything other than hoarding wealth is not natural. I think for many people, like with myself, it is hard to not care about your company, coworkers, the public. My conclusion is that companies, employees, the public and government need to exist and work towards symbiosis. The downward pressure the author speaks of is a result of parasitical thinking at the executive level of companies. This is first and foremost a failure of economists and policy makers. But it needs to be talked about openly. Unlike countries like China, we don't have a centrally planned economy where the state party culls parasitical companies when they are harmful to the host (country), that's why they don't like western companies that extract wealth out of there. Either companies and economists change their tune or government needs to change their tune for them.

No one owes you a job as the author states, but the responsibility that comes with being able to run a company and hoard limitless wealth, is that you are expected to exist in symbiosis not in hostility towards your environment.