How is it that we have 8 billion people on Earth, and yet it seems like almost all businesses and services are short-staffed?
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Number of people has no direct effect on this question. If you have X million people, they need services for X million people but also conveniently have a pool of X million people from which to allocate workers to render it. Demographics is one factor affecting it, however, as it is easier to do stuff when population is growing and more people are working age than old. With populations all over West shrinking and aging, workers that are left must feel an increased strain, and we have to resort ever more to automation to keep production up.
There also have been general cost increases in electricity, fossil fuels and access to various raw materials. Some of it is due to e.g. Ukraine war, but there is a systemic underlying issue of simple progressive depletion of natural resources available to humanity, the most important being the end of cheap fossil energy. We progressively have to invest ever more into our energy sector to keep up the level of production we are used to, which makes other parts of the society not able to use the resources invested there. With fossil fuels, we used to be able to “phone” to our rich old uncle for more cash whenever we needed it and were able to live lavishly beyond our means. However, the old uncle has become increasingly stringent with his money for the past 50 years or so. With renewable energy, situation is more akin to having to go to a job to earn your money, and suddenly we must all be pinching pennies because we can’t replace one planet’s worth of energy production quickly, and it is far from certain that humanity will ever again have as much energy to use as we do right now. Sad fact of life is, the fossil stuff is probably about half gone by this point, at least when it comes to oil, and what is left is not as good as what we had before, and we have to work much harder to get to it and refine it to something we can use. Not to mention the horror of what it does to our climate and overall livability of the planet…
The end result of supply-side strain and demographic transition is the littany of de-something: decomplexification, delayering, deglobalization, definancialization, the sort of things where companies must focus increasingly on efficiency, make fewer kinds of products, eliminate middle men, use local production, and we can’t fake growth with monetary tricks such as everyone being up to their eyeballs in debt on the theory that some beautiful future day, increase in production and wealth makes these debts payable. When it becomes obvious that economy can only shrink going forwards, the financial markets will melt down in the most epic crash of all time because it is all predicated on growth.
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