John Carney 13 Jul 2026
How to Reinvigorate the Wages of Young Workers and Revive American Birthrates
In 1978, Richard Easterlin stood before the Population Association of America and predicted that the wages of young American men — falling since 1973 — would turn around by 1984.
He had earned the confidence. As we have discussed in the past, Easterlin’s relative cohort size hypothesis was the most successful applied demography of its era, and it had already explained the biggest population event in American history—the Baby Boom. He replaced the mysticism about returning GIs, swooning Rosie Riveters, and suburban optimism with actual social science.
The gauzy version of the Baby Boom never made particular sense because our other wars didn’t have the same effect. World War I didn’t produce a comparable baby boom, and neither did the Civil War. And if you read the sociological literature of the time—or just watch the 1950s popular culture depictions of demobilized Americans—it just doesn’t hold up the idea of boundless optimism. At the time, people believed the post-war period was an era of stifling conformity, the man in the grey flannel suit, suburban ennui. Certainly, contemporary demographers weren’t predicting a post-war baby boom.
Easterlin found the explanation for the unexpected Baby Boom in economics. The Depression produced small birth cohorts. Those cohorts came of working age in a booming postwar economy and immigration tightly restricted by the Immigration Act of 1924. The “lucky few” folks walked into a market starved for workers. They got high wages relative to what they’d grown up expecting, and so they married early and had a lot of children.
Tight labor markets and closed borders made the Baby Boom. That is the core of Easterlin’s thesis, and it is the part of his work that has aged best.
more [long]
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2026/07/13/breitbart-business-digest-how-immigration-robbed-gen-x-and-millennials-of-their-future/
