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Comment by ed312 | Hacker News Reader

I rarely see any mention of how just so many people dying + becoming disabled impacts the job market. Historically big drops in available labor lead to improved labor negotiation (e.g. working conditions, wages). The "great resignation" is only one facet.

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COVID probably hasn't had a major impact in that respect there are a total of 859,354 deaths in the entire country which is only 0.2% of the population, but of the working population it is even smaller than that as almost half of that is in individuals who are 75 or older and unlikely to be participating in the workforce dropping us to less than 0.14% of people being effected, or slightly more than 1 in 1000 people.

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

Thanks for replying with that... there's no mass piles of bodies in the streets impacting the workforce.

That's incredibly helpful, thanks! I assumed the deaths were skewed somewhat to elderly but not to such an extreme. I wonder how this impacts calculations of e.g. social security payments and wealth transfers in the US.

Worked great during the (surviving) workers during the bubonic plague. https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-bet...

Worked well if you liked counting money. But if you liked spending it...

"Thus the undisputed rise in nominal or money wages following the Black Death was literally ‘swamped’ by the post-Plague inflation, so that real wages fell." https://ideas.repec.org/p/tor/tecipa/munro-04-04.html

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