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Last month I dragged my two younger kids to see Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. It was, at best, funny in parts. The theater was nearly empty and the film performed even worse than the fictional band itself. An entertainment misfire on my part, save for one thing: introducing them to the trope of the dead drummer.
Inspired by the untimely deaths of drumming legends like Keith Moon and John Bonham, the best running joke in This is Spinal Tap is that drumming in a hard-rocking band is dangerous and often fatal. Tap’s original drummer, “Stumpy” Pepys died in “a bizarre gardening accident.” His replacement, “Stumpy Joe” Childs choked on vomit – not his, someone else’s. (No one knows whose because “you can’t dust for vomit.”) Next in line, Peter “James” Bond spontaneously combusted on stage, as did Mick Shrimpton. Subsequent drummers were reportedly eaten by their pet pythons or listed as “either dead or playing jazz.” So when Tap goes looking for a replacement for the belated, benighted sequel, Questlove, Lars Ulrich, and Chad Smith demur with fake excuses, opening the door for Tap’s first female drummer: the only sign of life in the sequel.
In a case of life imitating art, more drummers have passed since Tap came and went. In the past few years, we’ve lost Neil Peart and Taylor Hawkins. This summer, the drummer for Sting’s opening act had a heart attack on stage. We’ve also seen a rash of bands firing their drummers. Like Foo Fighters, which replaced Taylor Hawkins’ replacement, and Guns N’ Roses, which fired their longtime drummer in March and may be on the verge of another change. And in something out of Spinal Tap – and funnier than anything in the sequel – Keith Moon’s old racket, The Who, terminated Zak Starkey (Ringo Starr’s son), then rehired him, then fired him again.
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We are Spinal Tap from the UK. You must be the U.S.A.
- Spinal Tap lead singer David St. Hubbins
Like all famous bands except for Spinal Tap, when the U.S.A. has lost people, it hasn’t had any difficulty replacing them. From well before its founding, America’s population has grown every single year – through the Depression, pandemics, and the Civil War. This makes us unique. No other country has a population winning streak lasting hundreds of years.
The streak may come to an end this year. During the Great Recession, America’s birth rate fell below the “replacement” level – 2.1 children born for every woman – and never recovered. Last year, it ducked under 1.6. In 2024, America had about 500,000 more births than deaths (not including the three original members of Spinal Tap, although you wouldn’t know it from their performance in the sequel). This balance will turn negative in about five years unless we’re able to boost births. So continuing the streak will almost certainly hinge on net migration.
You see where this is heading: right for a big, beautiful wall. Between the Trump Administration’s new border and deportation policies and unprecedented restrictions on legal immigration – including on student visas and work visas – 2025 negative net migration could exceed natural growth (from births > deaths). As Abundance co-author Derek Thompson noted last month, it’s easy to foresee negative net migration of 500,000+ from President Trump’s policies and population decline for the first time in our history. This includes not only fewer new Americans, but old Americans opting out, like Nobel Prize-winning economists, noted historians, and alleged Antifa members. Following 2024’s 1.0% growth – the fastest population growth since 2001 – decline in ’25 will be a whiplash-inducing turnaround.
It’s also likely this is the new normal. In 2024 2.8 million legal and illegal immigrants entered the country; we shan’t see its like again. Republicans have become the party of closed borders while the Democratic Party is shellshocked on immigration. In terms of population change, we’ll be in the same boat as Japan, South Korea, and most of Europe. American exceptionalism is at an end.
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What does a shrinking America mean for education and the workforce? Our rich-country-leading growth rate of 2.5% over the past three decades is the product of both table-topping technological innovation and population growth. If we want to continue growing the economy at the same pace, assuming innovation continues at the same pace – something of a leap considering the innovative immigrant minds we’ll be foregoing – we're going to have to compensate for lack of population growth. And the most obvious lever is found in our exceptionally inefficient education and labor markets.
Education and labor market signals are weak and inconstant, resulting in poor education and training outcomes, millions of bad hires, and tens of millions unhappily stuck in bad jobs. We’re wasting waves of workers who could be more productive and better off. Making these markets more efficient means doing a better job transforming potential to capabilities and matching capabilities to labor market need. The good news for Republicans and America is that technology is coming to the rescue.
The disconnect between education and employment is a data problem. Employers have never been very clear on the skills, experience, and capabilities they require, educators haven’t been particularly interested in finding out, and candidates are always out to lunch. So hiring managers have been content to rely on signals supported by anecdotal evidence at best. Like hiring psychology majors into customer success roles because they “read people well.” Or theater majors into marketing positions so they can “storytell the brand journey” of some CBD hummus. Or assuming that success as a college football coach translates into success in the NFL, or vice versa.
There’s already a good deal of labor market data. But we need much more – plus the ability to make sense of it. Fortunately, this is exactly what AI does best. We are seeing an explosion in competency data from AI tools that infer skills from education, experience, interviews, and assessments. At the same time, platforms are starting to track employee performance and progression and identify which skills, experiences, and capabilities are most predictive of success. So job descriptions are moving from vague and data-poor to precise, data-rich renderings of top performers.
AI is ushering in the first true talent marketplaces. Talent marketplaces will guide:
Talent marketplaces will help students make better education and training decisions, employers make better hiring decisions, and educators offer better programs (and less training-and-praying). They will improve navigation, yield fewer bad matches, and produce better education and labor market outcomes. Back in 2018, I thought about talent marketplaces as a supercharged version of LinkedIn. So why have they taken so long? And what happened to LinkedIn?
Talent marketplaces have three sides: employers, candidates, and educators. In launching a marketplace, it simplifies things to start with two parties; bring those two together, add the third later. This explains why holistic talent marketplace startups have fallen flat. And even two-sided marketplaces – almost always employers and candidates – struggle mightily with a chicken-and-egg problem: how to attract the critical mass of candidates needed to attract a critical mass of employers without many/any employers on the platform? Solving this conundrum is the only way to get the flywheel moving.
With its mass of both candidates and employers, I thought LinkedIn had everyone licked. But while most employers rely on LinkedIn for recruiting, it’s not core to the broader HR function. Companies don’t keep employee performance data on LinkedIn. That’s the realm of human capital management (HCM) platforms like Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM Cloud, and UKG, as well as performance management software like Cornerstone OnDemand. And all these platforms are leveraging AI to introduce talent marketplace-like features for clients. Workday Talent Marketplace allows companies to match the skills and interests of employees to new opportunities and suggests learning paths. Cornerstone claims to do the same. All have recruiting modules and are extending similar functionality to candidates.
But it’s not a talent marketplace if candidates (and schools) can’t access, match, and apply to multiple employers in one sitting. (The same is true of universities building skills- and jobs-matching functionality for the benefit of students – and ostensibly employers.) At this point, it’s unclear how this sorts itself. Will Workday et al attempt to build cross-client marketplaces with access for candidates (and schools)?
Meanwhile, governments are taking the lead. For states, the chicken-and-egg problem is easier to solve. Governments have job seekers in their workforce systems as well as some employers. They’re also major employers themselves. So we’re seeing the emergence of talent marketplaces like FutureFit AI, which workforce agencies in South Carolina and Connecticut have white-labeled to improve navigation for employers, candidates, and educators. FutureFit features: (1) a talent portal for assessing candidate skills and matching them to jobs, training, and wraparound supports and services; (2) an employer portal for posting, recruiting, and matching; (3) an educator portal for attracting students and tracking outcomes (including placement); and (4) an administrator portal so states can keep tabs on education and labor markets as they become more efficient.
The good news is that we know talent marketplaces are possible. The bad news is that workforce systems only serve the hardest cases. In Canada, FutureFit has been used to launch Newcomer GPS to match new immigrants to jobs. This isn’t a use case the U.S. is likely to have in the near future. And for this very reason, states need to figure out how to expand new workforce development marketplaces to serve larger populations of candidates, employers, and educators. As workforce systems and boards leverage their new AI platforms to expand their remits, states can simultaneously support chambers of commerce and industry associations in launching talent marketplaces of their own, starting with the geographies and sectors with the greatest inefficiencies.
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It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.
- Spinal Tap lead guitar Nigel Tufnel
A shrinking America sounds very dark indeed. Population decline won’t only jeopardize our standard of living, economic opportunity, and hope for the next generation. It also imperils tax revenue, which funds sacrosanct benefits like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and convinces investors to buy our debt. Taxes also fund national defense. So as President Trump hopes to boost defense spending to the $1 trillion level, it’s an unhappy irony that clamping down on immigration and immigrants for national security reasons will ultimately jeopardize our national security.
We don’t need fully functional, universally accessible talent marketplaces tomorrow. While we’ll have negative net migration this year, we’ll probably be back in the black before the end of the Trump presidency. But whenever population growth resumes, it’ll be much slower. And the resulting gap is best closed by fixing education and labor markets. If we can do a better job putting Americans to work, we won’t need to attract as many new Americans to maintain growth.
The federal government is now marching to the beat of a different drum. States can't control who’s let into the country – or whether anyone is. But they can leverage AI-powered talent marketplaces to make their education and labor markets work better.
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Over the
closing credits of This is Spinal Tap, lead singer David St. Hubbins had this informative interaction with filmmaker Marty DiBergi:
Marty DiBergi: David St. Hubbins... I must admit I've never heard anybody with that name.
David St. Hubbins: It's an unusual name, well, he was an unusual saint, he's not a very well known saint.
Marty DiBergi: Oh, there actually is... there was a Saint Hubbins?
David St. Hubbins: That's right, yes.
Marty DiBergi: What was he the saint of?
David St. Hubbins: He was the patron saint of quality footwear.
If governments turn the impending population crisis into an opportunity to improve education and labor market signals, Perhaps Trump – an unusual saint, to say the least – will become the patron saint of talent marketplaces.