« links for 2010-03-22 | Main | Tax Increases are Inevitable: What Types of Taxes will Change the Most? »

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

"Too Many Open Jobs by 2018?"

What do you think of this prediction?:

Will Retiring Boomers Lead to Too Many Open Jobs by 2018?, by Justin Lahart, Real Time Economics: Right now, there are about five times as many people looking for work as there are jobs to be filled. But by 2018, a new study argues America could be facing the opposite problem — more jobs than there are people to fill them.
It comes down to demographics, argue Barry Bluestone and Mark Melnik of Northeastern University in a study sponsored by the MetLife Foundation and think tank Civic Ventures, with retiring Baby Boomers leaving a huge number job vacancies in their wake.
The two project that by 2018 there will be 14.6 million new nonfarm payroll jobs, plus some additional jobs in farming, family businesses and so on. Meantime, with no change in immigration policy or labor force participation rates, there will only be about 9.6 million workers available to fill those positions, leaving a gap of more than 5 million jobs that are vacant.
For the moment many older workers, having seen their net worth wither, have been hanging on to their jobs. ... The study’s authors believe that in time, the problem won’t be older workers hanging on to their jobs past retirement age, but older workers not staying in the labor force long enough.
“Not only will there be jobs for these experienced workers to fill, but the nation will absolutely need older workers to step up and take them,” they write.

    Posted by on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 12:12 AM in Economics, Unemployment | Permalink  Comments (51)


    Comments

    Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.