A Post Outlook Writer Who Has Never Read the WP (demographic transition = labor shortage? piffle.)

[Hannah Bell]

As every Washington Post reader knows, the United States and much of the industrialized world faces a dire future because of stagnant or declining populations. As a result in 20 or 30 years we will have an enormous labor shortage in which there is no one to change the bedpans of all us soon to be retired old-timers.

The Post routinely repeats this view, not only on its editorial pages, but also in endless news articles on how Italy, Japan, and even China face this dire demographic meltdown. It almost never allows a contrary view into its pages, once of the reasons it came to be known as "Fox on 15th Street."

However, today the Post printed a front page Outlook piece that did not argue against the demographic nightmare story, it completely ignored it. Gregory Clark, an economics professor at the University of California at Davis told Post readers that: "the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills."

Okay, let's go through this in a way that even a Post editor can understand. An "ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills," implies a growing supply of people without skills that are demanded in the market. In other words, this means a surplus of labor. A surplus of labor is the exact opposite of a shortage. We can not both have a huge surplus of labor and a huge shortage of labor at the same time. If Clark is remotely close to being right, then the Post constant whining about a demographic nightmare is nonsense...

In short, Mr. Clark is exactly right that the Post's is spewing nonsense in its demographic meltdown spiel, but he is wrong in worrying about an excess supply of people with few skills. The relative supply and demand for people with less education will be determined by politics, not the natural workings of technology or the market.

--Dean Baker

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press

[Hannah Bell]

1. i guess the unrecs were from those who like wp's anti-labor propaganda.