December 01, 2014
Yep, that’s right, just as it did over the last fifty years. Nonetheless, the NYT thinks we should be very worried telling us:
“The population shift will be a major problem by 2060, when there will only be 1.3 workers per retiree, against 2.3 now.”
Of course if we go back 50 years it would have been almost 5.0 workers to retiree. (The OECD puts the ratio at 4.9 in 1964, compared with 2.9 today and a projection of 1.5 in 2064.) So basically we will see the sort of demographic crisis going forward as we have seen in the past.
But the hard to get good help crowd is very worried. Remarkably, the piece never once mentions wages. The traditional way in which employers dealt with shortages of labor is to raise wages. The employers that can’t afford to pay the going wage go out of business. It’s called “capitalism.” This is the reason that most people don’t still work on farms. Wages are not rising especially rapidly in Germany, which seems to contradict the headline of the piece, “German population drop spells skills shortage in Europe’s powerhouse.”
The piece also gives readers Germany’s official unemployment rate of 6.6 percent, as opposed to OECD harmonized rate of 5.0 percent. This is likely to mislead readers since almost no one will know that Germany counts part-time workers in their unemployment rate. By contrast, the OECD harmonized rate essentially uses the same methodology as the United States. (This is a piece from Reuters, but presumably the NYT’s editors can make edits so that it is understandable to its readers.)
Finally, an entry in the great typos on the month contest:
“There is a particular deficit of workers with adequate qualifications in maths, computing, science and technology.”
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