The Daily Chart: What a Baby Bust Looks Like

Want to know what a “baby bust” looks like? It looks like this in the United States, with a sharp divide between the Baby Boomers and what came after.

The Atlanta Fed comments:

An aging population is a big reason for the worker shortage that’s helped fuel inflation over the past 18 months. Analysis by Atlanta Fed senior policy adviser John Robertson shows that the working age population has hardly grown over the past three years. Instead, virtually all of the recent increase in the population that’s 16 and older has been among seniors.

The number of people aged 25 to 54, a group economists call “prime-age” workers, inched up just 40,000 in 2022. Meanwhile, the number of Americans 65 and older jumped by 2 million. That continues a pattern. Since 2019, the prime-age worker population has barely changed while the size of the 65-and-older group has increased by nearly 5 million.

This is also interesting:

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