"You can't have the vast majority of your prime-age work force retire and not have it have an effect," Mr. Kaihla said.
Research into the changing — and increasingly aging — work force has also been accompanied by encouraging findings on the mental abilities of the aging.
The decline is largely a result of growing competition from Asian rivals, an aging work force and merciless gains by the yen.
German companies have been trying to recruit for professions from engineering to health care as more people leave the country's rapidly aging work force.
Rising unemployment claims demonstrate laziness, not lack of jobs; rising disability claims represent malingering, not the real health problems of an aging work force.
German business and government are in agreement over one thing: Both are worried about paying the pension bills for Germany's aging work force.
What is "probably the fastest aging work force in the country," according to Mr. Buerhaus, the associate dean of Vanderbilt University's school of nursing?
An aging work force, smaller productivity gains and the sheer math of diminishing returns mean it must borrow more money to achieve less growth.
In his case, that happens to be a sprawling urban archdiocese with all the problems that face Catholic bishops across the country: financial concerns, faltering schools and a shrinking and aging work force of priests and nuns.
An aging work force — 12 percent of workers were over 55 in 1999, increasing to 19.5 percent in 2010, the report says — means that more of us will face this issue.
Economists point out that some of the drop in state unemployment merely reflects people giving up on the job search or retiring early, as well as an aging work force with fewer young people hunting for jobs.
