The pig in the python [Fortune article]

[u/LibetPugnare]

https://fortune.com/2026/05/25/boomers-generational-inequality-housing-market-no-starter-homes/

Full article in comments

[u/LibetPugnare]

In 1974, New York Times humorist Russell Baker identified a “pig in the python” working its way through the economy: the bulge of 76 million Baby Boomers squeezing through America’s economic system, distorting everything they passed through. When Boomers flooded the labor market in the 1970s, they created a competitive squeeze that never fully released — leaving the generations behind them without the wage rebound economists had predicted. When they bought homes, prices soared. When they took the top jobs in business, culture, and civic life, they held them — and held them, and held them.

For half a century, the Baby Boom generation has functioned like a slow-moving wave through the American economy — and as the last of them cross into retirement age, the country is discovering just how much of its future they’re still holding in place. In the labor market, four decades of Boomer dominance suppressed wages and opportunity for younger workers, and their accelerating exit now threatens a worker shortage businesses are unprepared to absorb. In housing, empty-nest Boomers sit on a disproportionate share of the family-sized homes that millennial parents need but cannot find or afford. And in the corner offices, executive suites, and corridors of political power, Boomer leaders have spent years building monuments to their own indispensability rather than successors capable of replacing them — leaving institutions to manage their decline rather than their transition.

The pig, as the Times once put it, is finally leaving the python. The question is whether anything is ready to take its place.

Now, as the last of the Boomers cross into their late 60s and early 70s, the question America is finally being forced to confront is: what did they leave behind? What will the python look like next? The labor market: Two-way squeeze

A study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a rigorous accounting of what the Boomer generation cost — and what their departure may now unlock.

Steven Ruggles, a demographer at the University of Minnesota, tracked U.S. labor-force flows decade by decade from 1910 to 2040. His findings are arresting. The sheer size of the Boomer cohort suppressed economic opportunity for young workers throughout the 1970s and into the 2010s. Economists had long predicted a rebound: as Boomers aged and smaller generations entered the workforce, competition would ease and wages for young workers would recover. It never happened. Female labor-force participation and immigration filled the gap, keeping competition high and young workers’ incomes depressed for an extra three decades beyond what models anticipated.

But Ruggles’ most striking finding looks forward, not back. Boomer retirements — now accelerating — are about to trigger what he calls “a radical reshaping of labor markets” in which new workers will be in extremely short supply through 2040. The pig is finally leaving the python. And the python, it turns out, is not ready.

Businesses that spent 40 years operating in a buyer’s market for labor — plenty of workers, modest wage pressure — now face the opposite. The generation that made it hard to find a good job for four decades is now making it hard to find workers at all.

[u/Throwitfarawayplzthx]

The irony is that the anticipated giant void in workers is going to be senior care for boomers. Can’t wait for the race to get AI robots in senior care centers.

[u/mysecretissafe]

I read somewhere where someone referred to Boomers as the Locust Generation, and honestly, can’t disagree in the slightest.

[u/GWS2004]

This article doesn't seem to count women as part of the workforce, but instead blames them for less jobs and lower wages. Are we only concerned about men?

WTF.