Millennials are pounding the pavement and helping to lead the best three-month period of job growth in 17 years. The population of workers ages 25-34, who make up the prime working age, is growing and that’s good news for the economy.
Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist, Michael Santoli says America is getting younger and that should give an extra boost to economic growth in the coming years. “Right now the most common age in America is 23. So 1991 was the peak birth year of this generation. So they’re going to be turning 24 this year and that’s going to carry through for a long time. Presumably as they get jobs, houses and cars.”
For the most part, these younger Americans are graduating college and hitting their ideal working years. Santoli says the sheer size of the generation is key to job growth. “It’s not so much that they were out of the workforce and they’re streaming in, as much as there are many of them reaching peak labor force years. Essentially they are getting into the heart of their working lives.”
People who are in their 20s make up the largest group of Americans. Their coming of age directly coincides with the baby boomer generation retiring. “This is the replacement cycle of humanity. Population growth and especially the working age growth is a key input in how fast the economy can grow. When you had the baby boomers entering this period in the 1970s and 1980s you had very rapid labor force growth and that was really a boost to growth. That’s why we got used to faster economic growth rates,” says Santoli.
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The hope is for this latest group of younger Americans to make strides in the work force and pump more capital into the economy. “Now we don’t really have the credit growth so you have to have people in there starting to be productive, starting to consume more and that’s basically what gives you the economic growth,” says Santoli.
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