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.
The fertility rate has dropped almost in half during my lifetime. Women went from having three children to two.
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.
This is interesting and thought-provoking info. I've been following some of the "Help Wanted" news stories, but hadn't come across these population (and immigrant population) decline stats. Thanks for the "aha" moment, Peter.