![]() ![]() The United States is not alone in facing the specter of demographic decline. With labor shortages relentlessly driving up wages and inflation, America’s economic need to jumpstart that engine is becoming more urgent by the day. ![]() But today, with fewer workers, the American economy is straining to grow with one stalled engine. #WHERE ARE THE SEISMAC GAPS IN WASHINGTON STATE PLUS#Over time, economic growth is simply a function of population growth plus productivity growth: more workers with each producing more. Today, the United States has a labor shortage of about 11 million workers, a number roughly equivalent to the number of job openings unfilled this year, nearly two for every unemployed person still looking for work. Two million more, among them parents lacking adequate childcare, left the workforce. In what’s being called the Great Resignation, nearly 2.5 million Americans took early retirement. The pandemic only made a bad situation worse. If its growth had not started to slow sharply around 1998, the working age population of the United States would today be larger by 44 million people. With fewer babies maturing into adults, the working age population-16 to 64-began to decline by the mid-1980s, first in Europe and Asia, then later in the United States. Amid the cultural seismic shifts of the 1970s, women around the world started having fewer children. chief executives call the labor shortage their “number one external threat.” There is, in fact, plenty of room-and need-for more immigrants in an American economy suffering from an acute and worsening labor shortage.Īccording to a recent survey by the Conference Board, a majority of 900 U.S. ![]() Such debates tend to portray the United States as unable to cope with more people. President Joe Biden proposed welcoming 100,000 war refugees from Ukraine, several commentators wondered why Washington had failed to do the same for tens of thousands of Afghan allies left behind to face the Taliban. ![]()
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