Prices of everything are climbing, and inflation hit 7% in this past year. Grocery store shelves are empty. Need a water heater replaced? You’re going to wait a few weeks. Good luck buying a car. Trash is going uncollected.
Do you like these shortages, long waits, empty shelves, rising prices, and piles of trash with nobody to pick it up? If so, you’ll love the future if America’s baby bust continues.
The current shortages are caused by a whole melange of bizarre factors, mostly hooked to the pandemic and our responses to it. But everyone should remember what this feels like because more of this is in store if we continue down our current demographic road.
The birthrate in the United States hit record lows even before the pandemic, and the pandemic drove it further down. The average woman is having about 1.6 children in her lifetime now, which is half a child below the level needed to keep the population stable. Our most recent census reported fewer children than our previous census — in absolute numbers, not merely percentages.
Even our working-age population has been shrinking for two and a half years.
Fewer children today means further shrinking of the working-age population tomorrow. Yet, the baby boomers are retiring, and the millennials are approaching middle age. Those two massive generations will be doing plenty of consuming, or trying to do plenty of consuming.
Meanwhile, fewer and fewer people will be available to work. But we’ll have fewer people to bake the bread, fewer people to deliver the bread, and fewer people to stock the shelves. The shrinking number of working-age adults will increasingly be changing bedpans, and so, other products and services will be scarcer.
This will drive up wages and pull some working-age folks back into the workforce, But there’s only so much slack there. If we continue to have sub-replacement-level birthrates, and especially if our birthrates continue to fall (as they have done in Western Europe and East Asia), we will simply have much fewer workers for about as many consumers.
Sure, in the long run, theoretically, this will level off, but that won’t happen until the millennials all die off.
Again, the current causes of shortages, waits, and inflation will fade away. But a big one is just below our demographic surface.
