‘People just do not want the world to change so much’: The war over the future of work being fought by Gen Z

In 2009, the great blogger and cultural critic Mark Fisher picked up on the concept of “capitalist realism,” describing a state of mind where the triumph of this economic organization of life was so complete that it was impossible to imagine an alternative to it.

But Fisher, who died in 2017, surely didn’t consider that two capitalisms would compete for headspace.

In one story, the Citrini Research “ ghost GDP ” thesis, AI is essentially a substitute for labor: codifiable, routine, formalizable work gets automated or compressed, hiring for it dries up, and the firms that move fastest win.

In the other, something like Alex Imas’ “relational work” thesis, AI is a complement to labor, raising the value of tacit, contextual, hard-to-codify human judgment, and the firms that treat it as a replacement rather than a force multiplier for people, are quietly mispricing their own workforce.

Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute, ran a simple , clarifying experiment this week : ranking every industry’s quits rate against its own 25-year history, rather than against every other industry’s raw rate, splitting the labor market into three tiers that haven’t moved together since 2022—revealing a split between the two capitalisms.

In finance, insurance, information, and professional and business services (FIIPB) the quits rate has fallen to the 13th percentile of its own 25-year range.

It sits at 1.8%, down from 2.5% in 2019, a 28% drop, and the lowest reading since 2013.

The rest of the private economy is sitting at the 44th percentile, close to its historical norm.

Government, education, and health care are at the 71st percentile—effectively unchanged from 2019.

“Job hugging is real, but it’s mostly happening in one part of the economy,” Levanon wrote on LinkedIn.

“Only FIIPB has collapsed … because that’s where the jobs stopped.” Levanon found that FIIPB employment peaked in early 2023 and has been falling ever since.

“People quit when they have somewhere to go, and in a sector that’s shedding jobs there’s nowhere to go.” Bureau of Labor Statistics data released September 1 shows professional and business services hires fell by 188,000 in July alone, even as job openings ticked up nationally.

When asked what was behind this—was this even the beginning of a reversal of the “financialization” of the American economy over the last four decades—Levanon told Fortune it’s probably not as sweeping as that.

More simply, he said it was “a decline in the labor intensity of white-collar work.” “FIIPB output kept growing; the labor needed to produce it didn’t.