Something has changed in the jobs market. In Australia, interest rates have risen sharply, consumer demand has turned negative, housing activity has slowed and the overall economy is running below trend. But like elsewhere in the world, job markets are tight – so tight that the unemployment rate has barely increased from near 50-year lows.

At one extreme, maybe the policy tightening has been so rapid that we’ve just forgotten how long it takes for rising rates to squeeze households into reducing their spending. At the other extreme, there are some very interesting structural drivers emerging that might be discouraging employers from prematurely letting workers go, even as the economy slows.