Generational Warfare at Work
Concrete Evidence (June 8, 2026)
Half a century ago, America was only beginning to grapple with its enormous Boomer cohort. If you put the country’s age distribution on a graph, a 1971 New York Times article noted, these new young people created a bulge that looked like “what happens when a pig is eaten by a python”—and would move through the snake gradually as they aged.
The economist Richard Easterlin, in writings that began in the 1960s, predicted that these young adults would have profound effects on the labor market. Depression-era babies had been few in number, and thus were in high demand for early-career work when they began adulthood. But as the far more numerous Boomers flooded the job market in the ’70s, they’d raise competition and reduce wages.
A new study from the demographer Steven Ruggles (ungated copy here) reassesses this theory with the full benefit of hindsight. Ruggles asks what it will mean for Boomers now to leave the work force as abruptly as they joined it all those years ago, as they approach the other end of the python.
Ruggles finds that the theory worked well in the early stages of Boomers’ careers: “Incomes of young people rose spectacularly after World War II as the small Depression-era birth cohorts entered the job market, and the trend abruptly reversed in the early 1970s as the large baby boom cohort came of age.”
However, it fell apart in the 1980s. As smaller cohorts such as “Gen X” started working, wage growth should have rebounded, but it didn’t.
Ruggles argues that the theory is salvageable, though. By focusing on cohort size, Easterlin had ignored some major contributors to the number of workers available: immigration, women’s labor-force participation, and retirements.
Ruggles creates a new index of labor-force competition, representing “the cumulative net labor-market entries over the previous five decades as a percentage of the working-age population in the current decade.” This measure rose until 1990 and then tapered off only slowly, though it’s expected to drop precipitously as Boomers retire without being replaced by very many new workers.
This is a much better fit for trends in wages. And it suggests that, for all the concern about entry-level workers in the age of AI, the young people of the near future could be greatly aided by the Boomers’ mass exit coupled with their own small numbers.
It’s an interesting take on things. And I was struck by the way all of these phenomena raise the same concern: do new workers drive down wages? Yet they have different political valences, with skepticism of immigration and working women identified with the various factions of the right, while ragging on Boomers is practically the new national pastime.
At any rate, I think the fairest criticism of the study is that it’s a 10,000-foot view of overall trend lines, and it can’t prove these phenomena actually caused the relevant wage trends. There’s already a big and contested literature on immigration’s wage effects, as well as a somewhat smaller one on women’s labor-force entry (see, e.g., this study and this one). Ruggles brings together these concepts and contributes some suggestive findings without resolving the major questions.
If Boomer-bashing gives researchers more cover to ask politically incorrect questions, though, I’m all for it.
From the Manhattan Institute
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How cops handle stalking cases.
Nursing homes given immunity from lawsuits during the pandemic reduced their staffing a little as a result.
Did imports play a role in the decline of U.S. manufacturing productivity?
Do health-care providers hold a lethal stigma against the clinically obese?
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The counterpoint is countries like Greece and Italy, which historically had high birth rates, where the birth rates have now plummeted, however relative wages are lower than ever.