George Rebane
Here’s a quick back of the envelope look at the employment situation over the next decade when we take into account accelerating technology that increases worker productivity. GDP growth is taken at the indicated 2.5%/year. This post is really as a ‘memo to file’ since people have asked me how I come up with the 70 million un/underemployed in the next decade with unemployment at 35%. Even with GDP growth at 5%/year, the 2022 unemployment does not come down below 17%. The blue numbers are inputs. I have posted the actual Excel spreadsheet here so that readers may play with it and insert their own numbers – Download Employment2022.
[Addendum] Given that 3% growth rate includes a large influx of immigrants, let’s look at what happens if our growth rate is only 1%. Then unemployment would still continue rising and reash above 20% in ten years as seen below.
To see what is required to achieve “full employment” (4% unemployment) over the next ten years, we would have to keep our population growth low, kick our economy into a historical rocket ride (4%/yr), and reduce the technology contribution to productivity to 2.5% or lower. See below.
rebanesruminations.com 
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