While population shifts gradually, measures to reshape the workforce can have a rapid impact, because you don’t have to wait fifteen to twenty years for a woman, a retiree, or an economic migrant to grow up. Providing childcare services can bring women with children back to work. Opening the nation’s doors to economic migrants can expand the working aging population virtually overnight. And reversing the twentieth-century campaign that pushed the retirement age down into the fifties in many industrial countries could bring a forgotten generation back to work very quickly.
