The Baby Boom busted.
Americans stopped having three kids. Now it's fewer than two.
Of course there's a labor shortage. It will get worse.
Between 2000 and 2010, the population under the age of 18 grew at a rate of 2.6 percent. The growth rate was even slower for those aged 18 to 44 (0.6 percent). . ..
The population aged 65 and over also grew at a faster rate (15.1 percent) than the population under age 45.
In past decades immigration powered our population growth. They entered the country and then had big families. That is changing. Immigrants become "Americanized" in family size. Over the past two decades, birth rates among foreign-born Hispanics dropped to nearly the same rate as White immigrants. Children of Hispanic immigrants--the 2nd generation--have essentially the same birth rates as native-born Americans.
In the early 1970s a huge cohort of Baby Boomers came into the work force. Americans experienced a population panic. Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb predicted we were on an unstoppable trend of population growth. He said the "Mother of the Year" should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children. Then reliable contraception became widespread. As countries become wealthier, and women had more freedom, they chose to have fewer babies or none at all. Women got educations and jobs. The birthrate dropped to below replacement rate and keeps dropping.
A school of thought among Democrats is that American women might have more children if children were not so expensive. Maybe if we had universal health care and child care, free pre-K, and more family-friendly taxation then young women would have more children. The data suggest otherwise. Low birthrates are universal in developed countries, in both Asia and Europe. The average woman in the European Union has 1.57 children, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. This includes notable "Catholic" countries, including Italy. It is also true in Protestant countries with robust social welfare programs. Sweden and Denmark have a fertility rate of 1.7 child per woman.
The COVID pandemic caused another decline in birthrates on top of the long-term trend. Births have a seasonality. They rise in the spring and peak in the summer. Babies are started in the winter and peak in the spring. The COVID shutdowns in the spring of 2020 showed up as yet-lower births in 2021.
Americans are experiencing something new and unfamiliar, a labor shortage. Baby Boomers are retiring and dying, which explains some of it. Fewer babies explain some more. For decades economists wrestled with unemployment. Unemployment is imbedded in our mindset and the mission of the Federal Reserve. There aren't jobs for people, we worried, and it will cause poverty and social unrest. We need to update our concerns. Boomers are retiring and we have a shortage of workers. Worse, looking ahead, we aren't producing new Americans who will enter the workforce in future decades and into mid-century. That is baked into the birthrate numbers.
We are encountering two trends in conflict. One is the resistance to population "globalism," i.e. immigration, one of the elements of a free market and movement of labor. The other is a need for workers to do the work desired by the prosperous consumers created by the free market and movement of capital.
The "culture war" that stopped comprehensive immigration reform is not unique to the U.S. We see it everywhere, from Brexit in Britain, to the rise of nationalist parties in Europe, to China's "re-education" of non-Han people, to religious nationalism in Turkey, to anti-Islam policies in India. Populist movements are pressing their governments to close ranks around traditional ethnicity and national culture.
Meanwhile, in the developed countries, we aren't replacing our own populations, so there is a labor shortage. Countries that still have high birthrates in Africa, Latin America, and Asia are producing workers. There is dis-equilibrium in supply and demand. It will get worse. Something big has got to change and it will shape the political conflicts of the next decades. It is already shaping the conflicts in this one.
8 comments:
I'm confused.
I thought automation was reducing the need for workers to produce goods. Do you mean there's a problem with fewer consumers?
What comes to mind here is something akin to how organisms react to changes in the environment, with fertility being a factor in times of less resources. Perhaps humans are reacting at a cellular level to climate change, and while you note the political ramifications maybe it's even more complex than we think.
Another thought is that educating whomever we have around might be a good idea. We might be producing fewer geniuses, when we need desperately need them.
Maybe we should let all those criminal immigrants from Central America come through Trump’s rusting wall so we have truck drivers to deliver all the things we want, need. It’s more difficult to find yard workers in Washington these days. The Hispanic yard guy in our neighborhood is no longer available as he got a better paying job. Picking fruit may be the next worker shortage job. Those rural voters who resist immigrants “taking our jobs” may want to rethink things.
As Trump and his cult clamored to get rid of all those “rapists and murderers” from “shithole countries,” I wondered who they thought would pick their crops and mow their lawns. Perhaps they envisioned a ‘guest worker program’ like the one we had before the civil war. That’s probably what they meant by MAGA.
A few observations on this post:
—The SCOTUS case Griswold was in 1965. Contraception was common and readily available by the early 1970s. Nixon himself signed Title X, channeling federal money to public health outlets like Planned Parenthood.
—That pop-jeremiad Paul Ehrlicn is somehow still considered a legitimate scientist to this day. He also predicted the world fossil fuel supply would evaporate by 2010 or so, when in fact there are more known reserves than ever. One of his protégés, on oil anyway, was Obama science czar Jon Holdren.
—What exactly is the progressive/Green position on population? I see men like Holdren as eco-Strangeloves who welcome human de-population as deserved, and good for the planet. Democrats are now openly citing the pandemic as a left-handed benefit at the polls.
—Immigration is not part and parcel with globalism. The objection to open borders is part of the objection, but the larger objection is that globalism assumes and invites the death of the traditional nation-state, in favor of a centralized authority covering most aspects of existence.
—Brexit like Trump’s shock victory occurred because progressives and globalists betrayed a longtime bedrock constituency, to wit lunchpail workers, whether in our Rust Belt or in Newcastle and Sheffield. The left patronizingly and mistakenly preens that race is s standalone causal factor here, rather than a concomitant to what matters—lost jobs and undercut wages. Balance. Yorkshire was full of BIPOC “Leave” votes.
It seems like there ought to be a common sense midpoint between open borders and closed borders. We do not want either so much immigration that it overwhelms assimilation, or so little immigration that we have labor shortages.
Maybe we need some thing like a guest worker program again. We need something sensible instead of the current chaotic emotionally driven mess that we have.
You'd have to have your head in a very low dungeon to believe that "Trump’s shock victory occurred because progressives and globalists betrayed a longtime bedrock constituency, to wit lunchpail workers."
Electing a black president freaked out white nationalists and other whackos. The GOP offered them asylum and the inmates soon took it over. They subsequently nominated and elected the biggest birther blowhard they could find, in spite of all the more qualified candidates who could have better addressed the needs of those poor, oppressed white guys. After four years of the White House being run like a malicious parody of a reality show, we find ourselves in a world of hurt. Gee, I wonder why.
If it was up to me, I would slam the borders shut. Let the American elites be served by the population they've created and educated.
The American Establishment has squeezed, squeezed, squeezed American workers, withholding the most basic essentials of civilized life such as a living wage and paid sick leave for half of the nation. While they tell us this is the richest nation on Earth. People don't have children because they can't afford to have children, then the elites complain about a labor shortage.....that they built, with malice aforethought.
Let the tables be unwaited, the spas lack staff. Not my problem.
The planet doesn't need more people, so fewer children being born is a good thing. Social Security needs to be adjusted so all levels of wages are taxed, not just the wages of the lower and middle class.
Second, the e-verify system needs to be mandatory. If republicans were really concerned about the hiring of people who are here illegally they would push for mandatory e-verify use. The republicans only concerned about undocumented people is how they can exploit them.
The churches also need to be taxed fully for social services. Churches encourage immigration (sanctuary) but then proceed to "bleed the beast."
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