Do you remember high school algebra? Perhaps you were a specially smart kid and took algebra in the seventh or eight grade and already know what this formula might be:
y = 41.228249x + 3032.9326
We took data from the JOLTS report from the St. Louis Fed website and began doing some calculations and extrapolations. We started with 2011 because that’s when the first baby boomers turned 65 and look at what’s happened each year after that year. Each year 10,000 boomers retire or about 3 million people and the trend line we calculated matches that number nearly perfectly. The year 2020 was the “midway” point between the youngest boomers and oldest boomers meaning we’ve “burned” halfway through the boomers so far or rather half of all boomers are now past age 65.
What we came up with is the equation above that will tell you how many projected job openings there will be in any given future year between now and 2030.
While it’s math, it’s not an exact science because this just assumes that the past trend will continue to grow linearly and in our data set, you can clearly see that Covid had a huge impact on the data trend so we took that massive “error” out and resumed with business as usual from now to 2030.
To make a long story short, we project between 8 to 12 million job openings EACH YEAR between 2022 and 2030 in the U.S. assuming no new major disruptions (e.g. new pandemic, major natural disaster, war, etc) or other miracles to population demographics.
We discovered while doing this math that we weren’t the only ones doing the calculations. Evidently, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting the labor force will grow 0.2% between now and 2030.
It is clear this will lead to wage inflation and decline of availability of labor dependent goods and services.
Stay tuned and stay solvent…
[…] growing since 2011. If covid abates mid 2022 we expect the open jobs number to come down but in Boomer Math, we still expect between 8 and 12 million job openings depending on how boomers feel about […]