Taps Coogan – August 19th, 2022

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We’ve made this point before and we’ll make it again as it’s one of the most important economic developments in Post-War American history: the US working age population has peaked.

The latest confirmation of the trend comes via the creator of the Econimica website and shows the US population under the age of 60 as well as the UN forecast for that age group for the balance of this century. UN forecasts have tended to over-estimate population growth.

As we’ve been noting since 2020, the US working age population started shrinking in late 2019. Covid and the deaths of despair resulting from the lockdowns have only made matters worse.

Peaks in both Japan and the Eurozone’s working age populations coincided with dramatic slowing of growth, stagnations in productivity, rapid increases in government and corporate debt, poor relative stock market performance, and so on.

Because it takes 16+ years to make a working age individual, there is very little that can be done to reverse this trend in the short term (other than immigration). Like every other high income country in the world except Israel, the US fertility rate is well below the replacement level of 2.1.

Compounding the problem is the fact that the average life expectancy in the US has been trending lower thanks to surging drug overdoses among prime working-age Americans, rising obesity, and more recently, Covid and the lockdowns.

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