June 14, 2010
There is something incredibly otherworldly about current economic policy debates. We are sitting here with almost 10 percent of our workforce unemployed. Let’s repeat that so even a policy wonk can understand it: almost 10 percent of the workforce is unemployed. That means people with the skills and desire to work cannot find jobs. The problem is too few jobs, too much supply of labor, got it?
Nonetheless, there is now a national fixation on the problems of an aging population. The story is that we will have too few workers to support too many retirees. That’s a problem of too little labor.
At a time when we have the greatest oversupply of labor since the Great Depression, we are now supposed to be terrified that in a few very short years we will not have enough labor. Is that possible?
Not if we know arithmetic. The NYT gave us a little glimpse of this horror story in its Economix blog today. It showed that the ratio of dependents (defined as people over 64 or under 20) to working age people (those between the ages of 20 and 64) is supposed to rise from 0.67 today to 0.74 in 2020, and 0.83 in 2030; pretty scary, right?
Well suppose we defined a slightly different dependency ratio. This will be the ratio of people who are not working to the people who are. The idea being that people who are working must support the people who are not, regardless of their age.
In 2010, this ratio stands at 1.22. We have 139.4 million people working and 170.1 million not working. However, if we assume that we get back to near full employment and the labor force grows as the Congressional Budget Office projects and population grows as the Census Department projects, this dependency ratio will have fallen to 1.05 in 2020 and then rise to 1.07 by 2030. So, are we scared yet?
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