Gee, I Wonder If There’s a Solution to This Impending Labor Market Crisis
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Hear me out here….could immigration solve this impending labor market problem?
Even as many workers are fearful that artificial intelligence could endanger their jobs, there’s a potentially bigger employment crisis on the horizon: a severe labor shortage that is set to emerge over the next 10 to 15 years, according to a leading demographer.
Demand for young workers is going to “explode” during that period, leaving employers with a shortage of qualified workers, according to Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, and the creator of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, or IPUMS, the world’s largest and most widely used population database.
A wave of baby boomer retirements will coincide with smaller cohorts of young people entering the labor market, resulting in a smaller overall workforce. That will lead to an “unprecedented situation” where, for the first time in U.S. economic history, more workers will leave the workforce than enter it, Ruggles said.
The labor force is set to shrink by 2.7 million workers, or 1.3%, from 2030 to 2040, according to Ruggles’ analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data and population growth projections from the Congressional Budget Office. That will come after the labor force grows by just 9.1 million people from 2020 to 2030, marking the smallest number of net entrants into the workforce since the 1960s.
“Some people think AI is going to take away all jobs. But there are going to be very few people who are searching for jobs, relative to the size of the economy,” Ruggles told CBS News.
An average of 10,000 boomers a day are turning 65 from 2011 through 2029, according to Census data. In 2025, a record 4.18 million Americans, or more than 11,400 people per day, turned 65.
“Baby boomers are quickly leaving the scene and there aren’t very many young people,” Ruggles added.
And this is of course true as it comes to young people–the decline in university enrollments is a real problem and while some of that is cost convincing people to not go, that’s really not the issue. People just aren’t having many kids anymore and there’s zero evidence that will change. A school like my employer is reasonably well-situated here–flagship state public, long-term relationships with surrounding states that make up for the small population, not too many foreign students that Trump cut off–but even so, we fell short of our enrollment projections this year and the budget is going to have to adjust to that. Of course, there is a way to solve all of these problems, which is to let in a few million immigrants a year. But there’s another alternative that is more likely–become so concerned about racial purity that we close ourselves like Japan and just age into endless stagnation rather than have to hear Spanish or Tagalog or Igbo among my housekeepers and meatpackers. Couldn’t have that now.