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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A lot of people giving pretty good answers, but I feel like the most direct answer is it takes 8 billion people to keep 8 billion people alive.
Look at it this way. In a village of 100 people you might only need 1 baker. That baker is kept very busy. If you increase the village population to 200 another person will have to take up baking if everyone wants to have bread.
There might be some jobs that don’t scale linearly like baker. You only need 1 village chief whether there are 100 people or 1000 people in the village. But most jobs are more like baker than village chief. Most jobs have a practical limit to how many other people can use their labor. A waitress can only wait on so many table as once, a mechanic can only fix so many cars in a day. So the more people you have the more you need doing the same jobs.
It’s really more technological innovation that leads to an ability for more people to be served by the same number of jobs. Give the baker an electric mixer and now all of a sudden he can make bread for 200 people.
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