Homecoming
According to the CIA World Factbook, Serbia has the highest death rate proportion of all countries in the world, at over 16 per year per thousand people. The top 15 countries, with the exception of Greece, are all ex-‘iron Curtain’ countries - either at various times part of the Soviet Union or in the Eastern European bloc.
The graph shows that the Serbian fertility rate has been ‘below replacement’ since 1956, with one exception. The cohort between 1956 and 1981 represents the ‘first’ ‘below replacement’ generation. A child born in 1956 would be of ‘marriageable age’ in 1981. The cohort from 1981 to 2006 represents the ‘second’ generation. If half of the children born in the first generation are girls, and these girls produce ‘fewer than replacement’ children when they are mothers, then the ‘population pyramid’ turns into a ‘diamond’, with a narrow top, wide center, and narrow bottom. The ‘third’ generation begins in 2006 and continues to the present. Those ‘great grandparents’ (those born before 1956) who are still alive now are dying at roughly the rate they were born in the late 1930's and 1940's, while the population of the generation of their great-grandchildren is 1/3rd the size of their ancestors.
If China imposes a ‘one child policy’ in the late 1970's, then the first generation of parents living under that policy reach the end of their reproductive lives roughly in 2005. If the population of China was 1 billion in 1980, half of that population would be female. Somewhat more than half of those women would either be children at that time or of childbearing age, so the cohort born between 1980 and 2005 would have roughly 250 million children.
Since presumably half of these are female, the following cohort, beginning in 2005, has half the number of children born to their grandparents. This suggests that the cohort born from 2005 to 2030 will number about 125 million. Since there were exceptions to the one child policy for certain groups and in any case the policy is no longer in effect, the current cohort may be larger. However, the children born in 2005 are just now turning 16 years old, where they might be of working age. For at least the next 16 years, the young people in China’s labor force will represent 1/4th of the population that would have existed if parents in China had had an average of 2 children per household over the last 40 years.
Postwar Prosperity in North America
At the end of WW II the industrial base of the US, Canada, and the countries of Latin America was largely intact. Europe and Japan were in ruins, therefore the US ‘owned’ the global economy until roughly 1970. As Germany, Japan, and later the ‘Asian Tigers’ industrialized, workers in the US faced low priced overseas competition. The 1970's was a period of ‘malaise’ with ‘rust belt’ factories, 10% unemployment, and a ‘misery index’ that combined high unemployment with high inflation.
These ‘Asian Tigers’ now have ghastly demographics. South Korea’s fertility rate is well below 1, and Japan, Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Viet Nam are all significantly ‘below replacement’. In some cases, this has been true for more than a generation, which means that the number of workers entering the workforce in these countries is far less than the number exiting at retirement age. The workforce situation in Europe is not much of an improvement. Jobs are ‘landing’ back in the United States simply because there is a worker deficit on a massive scale elsewhere. This creates the ‘impossible’ (according to economics textbooks) of high inflation combined with ‘two job openings for every worker looking for a job’.
‘English speaking countries’ (US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) all have ‘below replacement’ demographics, however to varying degrees all these countries have an influx of immigrants making up for some of the shortfall. While there is immigration in China, a country that is the ‘biggest in the world’ would simply exhaust the population of their neighbors if immigration were adequate, and if those neighbors didn’t have their own demographic shortfalls.
Thus we see US employers desperate for workers. A cruise down most Main Streets in the US sees convenience stores, gas stations, big box retailers, and other outlets ‘on every corner’. This worked more or less OK when there were plenty of hands available. Many of these operations are now shutting down or scaling back. Retailers and other service providers are going to have shorter hours, and might remain closed on whatever day is ‘slowest’. Other adaptions will involve some degree of automation, whether through on-line order taking, ‘take out’ only, or voice response customer assistance.
Given that ‘most’ of the industrialized world is a ‘generation short’ of labor, the US labor force is likely to live comfortably for at least the next 25 years, presuming that other large industrialized countries begin to address their demographic problems. This may or may not look like the ‘middle class’ lifestyle of the 1950's and 1960's, but it is certainly going to be more secure that the 1970's and the economic retrenchment of the Great Recession.