Since the start of the twenty-first century, the labor force has slightly shrunk as a proportion of the total population, but a major reason for this is that a higher percentage of Americans are now of retirement age.[67] In 1950, 8.0 percent of the US population was sixty-five or older;[68] by 2018 that had doubled to 16.0 percent, leaving relatively fewer working-age people in the economy.[69] The US Census Bureau projects—independent of any new medical breakthroughs that may be achieved in the coming decades—that over-sixty-fives will constitute 22 percent of the population by 2050.[70] If
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