We're facing a huge impending labor shortage. The trend in US wages/employment for youths doesn't seem to signal that. The trend in wages/employment for youths

We're facing a huge impending labor shortage. The trend in US wages/employment for youths doesn't seem to signal that. The trend in wages/employment for youths in nations with even lower fertility rates (Spain, Italy, Portugal...) doesn't seem to signal that. Even Japan, where absolute population decline is already underway, has good-but-not-amazing trends in wages and unemployment for youths. Where's the race to bid up the prices for young workers, and buy all their labor that's for sale, if an aging work force really is leading to crisis-level worker shortages? If the market expects a huge impending shortage of (e.g.) coking coal, you don't see the same lackluster demand for the output that's currently available. Maybe you meant that the shortage isn't coming in the next couple of months or years, but in a generation or so, so the market reaction isn't there yet. The view that I subscribe to, which seems common here on HN, is that technological change is going to significantly reduce the market demand for human labor in a generation or so. I expect that automation will generally deflate the market price of human labor faster than an aging work force can inflate it. Social Security solvency currently depends on lots of middle class workers earning wages, because its funding is structured that way. But that's a policy choice that is more easily reversed than fertility rates or technical progress in automation. If the problem is more about paying for retirees than lacking warm bodies to do work, higher fertility just makes government funding problems more severe: you end up with more people who need non-market support mechanisms if the market demand for additional human labor isn't there.