Boomer Bump and Peak Population
Now and then amid the gloom I see hopeful signs of degrowth. Some of these signs point to slow, or even no, population growth. This is partly transitory: the aging of the “boomers,” as Americans call my own outsized 1946–64 generation. Getting that bump out of the employment system sparks worry about how to pay for our outsized old age, but more important are the benefits a smaller workforce brings to labor over capital. Much more important would be if the transitory became permanent, leading to “peak people.”
The coal-fired steam power that first set humanity on a course to fossil fuel-driven industrial capitalism was adopted by British cotton-mill owners in the 1830–40s to ensure their access to a compliant pool of workers over whom they had full control, Andreas Malm wrote in his 2016 history of Fossil Capital.
Malm, also author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, found that the problem factory owners saw with the water-driven mills that produced cotton before coal became the fuel of the Industrial Revolution wasn’t that water wheels were more expensive to operate. On the contrary. Or that there weren’t enough river-front sites on which to build cotton mills. There were plenty. The reason these early capitalists chose steam over water was their desire for the unquestioned control needed to maximize profits. Such control requires a compliant workforce that only a large, growing, urbanized population without access to alternative employment can reliably provide. Steam had the flexibility to provide that, water did not.
This lesson of the importance of plentiful, cheap, and compliant labor was understood and applied with unparalleled force 120 years later by proponents of the most virulent form of industrial capitalism — neoliberalism. Unions were the first big target in the 1980s neoliberal turn that started under US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and continued under their successors Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
Once domestic labor unions were suitably bashed — not just in the US and UK but across Europe, where similar policies were accepted as necessary in order to “compete” — the path was cleared for trade deals and other policies that allowed corporations to move manufacturing to wherever the cheapest, most plentiful and compliant workers were found, which in the 1990s and beyond often turned out to be China.
Population Bump
How did this happen? How did Big Business get such a firm upper hand that it could overturn a post-war US and European political consensus on the need for balance in the access labor and capital enjoyed to the material benefits of economic growth. How did capitalists persuade politicians across the broad center of the political spectrum to adopt a “self-regulating” market in which giant corporations could basically deindustrialize the US and UK to the detriment of their populations, spread toxic filth over the globe along with the CO2 that is now destabilizing the world’s climate, and accumulate vast riches as a perverse reward?
There is no single easy answer. Many books have been written on the topic, often focused more on pushback after the anti-war, civil rights, and other political upheavals of the 1960s than on economic and broad social trends. But one important factor in the equation that often gets short shrift is the massive population bump once known as the “baby boom” that followed World War II in both the US and Europe.
In the US, the birth rate — defined as the number of live births each year for every 1,000 people — topped 25 throughout the 1950s before returning to the high- to mid-teens in the late 1960s, comparable to the rates seen during the Depression of the 1930s and the WWII years. It fell further in the early 1970s. At the same time, antibiotics and childhood vaccines were extending and spreading a longer process of massively reducing infant mortality.
Neoliberalism got its grip on the US as the no-longer-baby boomers were entering the workforce and working their way up the lower rungs of the job ladder. The sudden expansion in numbers of workers was huge, especially as the boomer effect was reinforced through the 1990s by an influx of women into paid work that basically doubled women’s “labor force participation rate” to around 60%, roughly where it remains today — a process I’ve referred to as “monetizing housework.”
The availability of all those new workers shifted power to the employers, as an over-abundant workforce always does. As a result, when rebuilding of the Japanese, German, and other European economies created competition that threatened to eat into American companies’ fat post-war monopoly profits, US industrialists were able to push the losses onto their compliant workers and, through prices, society more broadly.
Population Bust
Now the boomers are retiring, many of them sooner than expected, what with the favorable light that pandemic closures seems to have shed on living more and working less. The population bump is well underway in its passage out of the employment system and into retirement.
Workers are scarce. That much everyone knows. The question is why. On that, there’s no agreement. Unemployment rates are low, and wages are continuing to rise, especially at the low end of the pay scale. These are signs of a “tight labor market,” as economists see it. The Federal Reserve Board has been pushing up interest rates and, perhaps partly in response, companies aren’t adding a lot of new jobs. Immigration is back near pre-Covid levels. Younger women are returning to the paid workforce. That should loosen the labor market and bring down wage increases, thereby reducing inflation, the theory goes. But it isn’t — or not enough to suit Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
One explanation for the persistent labor market strength could be the accelerating exit of the boomer bump from the workforce. Boomer retirement is the type of rare demographic anomaly that standard employment ratios don’t measure well, if at all. So it doesn’t get a lot of attention from economists and business commentators and journalists. But having the smaller cohorts of workers born in the late 1960s and ’70s replace the plentiful boomers at the core of the workforce changes the dynamic. Workers are less plentiful and, therefore, perhaps not as cheap and compliant.
I’m not saying this explains everything that’s going on in the labor market. But it is surely an important factor in explaining why the US economy, politicians, and corporations responded differently to the energy price spike that accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than they did to the energy crises of the 1970s, when the boomers were entering the workforce.
In the early 1980s, US companies staged what has sometimes been called an investment strike, refusing to expand or modernize their domestic manufacturing base, laying off US workers as profits shrank, and building factories in other, lower-wage countries. Today, they are holding onto employees even when earnings droop, apparently concerned that if they fire people now, it will be hard to find replacements once business recovers. And manufacturing is being “reshored.” How extensively remains to be seen, but factories are definitely coming back to the US.
This time, instead of getting bashed, unions are gaining stength, albeit off a weak base. Large strikes, defined by the government as involving more than 1,000 workers, shot up by 52% last year over 2021, which had itself witnessed a big jump in worker activism.
You might think all that’s a good thing. I might agree. But it is regularly described as a “frustration” for the Fed in its efforts to bash inflation by bashing workers’ pay. You might also ask why I would see a strong US labor market as good for degrowth, since it is supporting relatively rapid US GPD growth. But degrowth, after all, is different from simple recession. It’s about abandoning capitalist-style growth in favor of a different way of living that is not just Earth-friendlier but also more equitable.
When fewer people are available to work, and those that are available are less compliant, power shifts away from capital towards labor. That’s a necessary prerequisite of degrowth. It doesn’t bring degrowth, but ordinary people (labor) have to hold some power in society for change to even be a real possibility.
Peak People
Is all this simply about the passing of the boomer bump from the workforce? Or is that just a trial run? Is something happening that’s bigger and more important than the aging of a generation? Could it be that the inexorable growth that took the world’s population from 1 billion to 8 billion over the last two centuries is about to end? Birth rates are tumbling around the world.
Western populations would generally be shrinking except for immigration. Much of East Asia has birthrates below “replacement levels.” China has witnessed an astounding plunge in the number of births in the last five years, and its population is in clear decline. India, the world’s most populous country at over 1.4 billion, registered just two children per woman 2019–21, below the 2.1 rate needed to reproduce a population. Covid may have distorted these numbers a bit and the country’s population bump will have to work through the system. But the handwriting is on the wall: Asia won’t witness much more population increase for much longer. Of the major regions, Africa accounts for most of the future population rise in most forecasts, and even it has already witnessed a sharp decline in the rate of growth this decade.
It’s by no means clear the world will reach the 10.4 billion that the UN is still forecasting. It’s not certain it will even reach 9 billion. And that’s without even considering the possibility that the numbers dying as a result of climate change and rising toxicity will leap from millions to billions.
Like everything else, the population is supposed to grow under capitalism. If one of the many “peaks” the world is facing is peak people, what would this mean for the limitless growth in the global economy that capitalism assumes? Is this another, critical marker on the path to degrowth? I don’t know, but maybe. It’s a topic we need to learn to talk about. Not someday, now.
