Where Did All the Workers Go?

 In a November 30, 2022, speech on "Inflation and the Labor Market," Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell blamed most of the 3.5 million estimated shortfall in the US labor force on premature retirements. He also blamed a large portion - between 280,000 and 680,000 - on "long Covid."

The Great Divide - 2020 vs. 2021

• In 2020, Covid-19 did not take very many lives, even among select groups of middle-age people, specifically those with comorbidities such as diabetes.
• In 2021, group life payments exploded by 20.7% over the five year average and by 15 percent over the acute pandemic year of 2020, despite the US administering 520mm COVID-19 vaccine doses.

Millennial Mortality

• All-cause mortality is crucial to understand whether public health policies are working
• 2021 was far worse for young and middle-age people than 2020
• 2022 was also worse than 2020, though not as bad as 2021
• Mortality rates in 2022 were still dramatically higher than the pre-pandemic baseline
• Covid-19 did not cause all these record deaths, but it was a significant factor
• Recent years saw an upswing in drug overdoses and suicides, which accelerated with the pandemic lockdown

Employment Aberration

• If we remove both COVID-19 and unnatural deaths (homicide, suicide, overdose, etc.), we see a dramatic spike of natural, non-Covid-19 deaths among working age people beginning in the spring and summer of 2021.
• In 2021, perhaps 20-40% of these group life insureds were unvaccinated, yet mortality barely rose. The math doesn't come close to working.

https://brownstone.org/articles/where-did-all-the-workers-go/