While reading an article by Adrian Slywotzky on how the lack of basic research investment over the past 20 years has doomed the US economy to a slow “recovery”, I decided to take a look at the raw BLS numbers myself. You don’t need a PhD. in economics to spot the “oh-sh*t” part of this chart:
source: BLS
The average annual rate of job growth in the U.S. over the 1980s and 1990s was around 1.9% a year. The annual rate of job growth over the 2000s (the ‘00s?) was… 0.2%! Even if you take out the 4.3% decline of 2009, the 10-year annual growth rate was only 0.8%, less than half the rate of the prior decade.
Here’s a more shocking number: If job growth had continued at the historic 1.8%/year rate since 2000, we should have north of 154 million jobs by now, instead of the actual 130 million. That means that we are short 23 million jobs for this decade! That’s about the population of Taiwan, and more than 50% higher than the official unemployment rate (14.9 million this month).
It gets worse if you also factor in record numbers of gen-Ys entering the labor force. There are currently 2.7 million more 20-something year olds (gen-Y) than there are 30-something year olds (gen-X):
source: U.S. Census
If something isn’t done to keep all those high-energy individuals gainfully employed, one can only shudder to think about the possible consequences.