“A newly released working paper finds that fewer Americans are taking night shifts…this shift is due to workers demanding higher wage premiums for night work rather than changes in the relative size of different industries,” reports The Doomslayer. “The trend exists in all major industries except retail.”
“Since the Industrial Revolution, our jobs have gradually improved, becoming better paid, more interesting, and less dangerous. Economists Jeff Biddle and Daniel Hamermesh detail another aspect of this development: that fewer and fewer Americans are working in the evenings and at night…Together, these studies suggest that the share of Americans working in the middle of the night has fallen by more than 50 percent since the 1970s,” reports The Update.
The percentage of employees at work at 1 AM has fallen from a little over 5% in 2003 to 3% in 2023.
The study by Biddle and Hamermesh “used two different methods to calculate the change between two different periods, with each showing a clear decline in the share of US employees working at night,” notes The Doomslayer.
The Update argues that “cheaper housing could slow the fall in population”:
In many countries, high housing costs lower fertility rates. But if the population declines, shouldn’t this eventually reduce housing costs as demand falls? And couldn’t that in turn increase fertility rates?
Economist Nicholas Decker argues that it could, and that standard population projections ignore this feedback cycle. He estimates that taking it into account raises the projected American population in 2100 by five to ten percent relative to a baseline model from the Census Bureau. Obviously, this figure is hugely uncertain, but so are existing population projections.
