While the coronavirus pandemic has exacted a once-unimaginable toll in human life, its financial cost is cushioned by an unusual confluence of global conditions shielding Americans from a much-worse economic catastrophe.
A country's economic growth is the product of two factors: growth in its labor force and productivity gains. National productivity gains can be altered or enhanced almost immediately by government policy or extraneous factors beyond government control. However, growing the labor force, even if a national policy to have more children were instituted today, would take 20 years to kick in. That's is the