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|  |  | Thursday, October 2, 2025 | | Sponsored by |  |  | | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, ADP finds job losses where gains were expected, the shutdown stretches into a second day, Karl Marx makes a tech-world cameo, and the barefoot office trend toes the line. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | When will the U.S. government reopen? Prediction markets think the shutdown could last weeks, not days, which would put this closure up against the longest and most costly ones in U.S.
history. | Investors left wondering about the shutdown’s impact on the S&P. Historically, markets have been resilient amid closures — but the longer the shutdown goes on, the greater the impact on stocks. | The U.S. government is running on half-staff. Education, health, and science
agencies are furloughing thousands, while critical services such as Medicare, TSA, border enforcement, and more will continue. | The furlough may turn into a firing. Trump has floated large-scale dismissals of federal employees — especially those he sees as opponents — while budget officials
start axing projects in Democratic-led states. | | | Sponsored |  | Become An AI Expert In Just 5 Minutes | If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.
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| | | WAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE | Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Karl Marx walk into a bar. One orders universal basic income (UBI), one orders socialism, and one mutters, “I told you so.” That’s the setup for the AI economy, where the richest men alive are suddenly workshopping Marxist punchlines. Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” answers a question about fairness with a deadpan “Socialism.” Altman talks about handing out monthly stipends. Musk has said we won’t have a choice about UBI. Silicon Valley’s moguls are trying on
the language of redistribution because their inventions may be too efficient at making everyone expendable.
The trouble is that the math doesn’t land. A bare-bones UBI of $10,000 a year would swallow about $3 trillion annually — roughly three-quarters of the federal budget — while doing little to offset the collapse of white-collar incomes. According to Goldman Sachs, up to 7% of the workforce could be displaced, mostly programmers, auditors, and paralegals. The top 10% of U.S.
earners, many in those very jobs, now account for nearly half of all spending. Hollow them out and you don’t just hit households — you hit the entire circulation of demand.
And even if the economics get penciled out, the politics don’t. A Congress that just passed Trump’s $1.1 trillion corporate tax break isn’t about to seize Silicon Valley’s AI windfall. MIT’s Daron Acemoglu dismissed UBI as “bread and circuses”: a shiny distraction while deeper inequality festers. And that means
universal basic income risks looking less like universal security and more like a political placebo: a capitalist system so efficient it starts producing “useless people” and a class of billionaires nervously proposing checks they know will never clear. Quartz’s Niamh Rowe has more on Marx’s prophecy getting an AI upgrade. | | LAID OFF THE RECORD | America’s job market is having a Where’s Waldo moment: The pink slips are visible, but the official scorekeeper is missing. Wednesday’s ADP data says private employers cut 32,000 jobs last month — the steepest drop in more than two years — just as Washington’s government shutdown ensures the Bureau of Labor Statistics won’t deliver its usual payrolls report. For now, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street are left trying to piece together the labor market like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces
missing.
The ADP data wasn’t pretty. Losses stretched across leisure, finance, construction, and manufacturing, with only health care and education posting gains. Economists had actually expected adds of 45,000 — meaning the surprise gap is wide enough to drive a moving truck through. Even August’s numbers got revised downward, flipping from a reported 54,000 increase to a net loss of 3,000.
Investors would normally wait
for the BLS to open the blinds. Instead, they’re left with what UBS’ Paul Donovan called “a keyhole view” of the economy. The shutdown has turned the government’s statistical backbone into a one-man band — deputy commissioner William Wiatrowski is literally the only employee still at the agency after Trump fired the last chief and pulled his nominee, EJ Antoni. That leaves the world’s biggest economy peering through a keyhole instead of opening the door — a dangerous guessing game with millions of jobs on the line. Quartz’s Alex Daniel has more on ADP’s big miss — and why it matters more than usual. | | | Sponsored | | Become An AI Expert In Just 5 Minutes | If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.
This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.
Subscribe right here. It’s totally
free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond. | |
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