> at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools

I don't think any sane person would be against raising ATC wages. But to refer back to my post, the situation might be different if it there were not also a massive pilot shortage as well! If these two pools of talent mostly overlap raising wages on one will probably just pull from the other.

It's probably a combination of raising wages and putting more money into recruiting teenagers considering vocational programs.

Because we are an aged society, with such an incredibly low birth rate, this will only get worse.

There are only so many competent people in our society, and that talent pool is being spread thin across all sectors of society which require such candidates.

There are looming doctor shortages, too. Professionals of all stripes.

The birth rate thing is a bit of a canard in this context. There are something like 100 million Americans under the age of 30.. we’ll have some demographic problems in a generation or two but there are plenty of people to staff the physician and ATC roles.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...

Yeah, I really don't think it's a lack of people, it's just that increased regulations make things continuously more cumbersome. Intelligent people are going to develop the skills that come with the least amount of operation overhead.

Is it?

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/ag...

Look at 1980's population pyramid. Look at 2020's. 1980 is how societies with mild population growth look. 2020 is how populations with below replacements look (see the graph end?)

It doesn't matter how many Americans are under 30. It matters how many are between 20 and 60. And my comment was about "coming up". Over the next 10 years.

There is a very significant shift in our populations, all across the entire planet. The US isn't as bad as some regions, but it's still bad. Moving from "lots of young people" to "the same amount of young people as old", means more taxes, fewer people working in society, and so on.

Older people require more doctors, too. So you have fewer people in the working pool (as a percentage of the overall population), but with doctors you need more, the more aged your population is. And it's not going to get better, it's going to get worse and worse, with such low birth rates. A downward spiral.

A doctor shortage cannot be solved with more money, sadly! It needs to be solved with political / regulatory means, allowing more people go through the hospital training / practice programs and become doctors.

Ofcourse it would. Capitalism is all about dealing with shortages in exchange for money.

So clearly someone just doesn't want to pay up.

I think there’s a catch, which is lag time. Even under pure capitalism, if the market doesn’t believe the money will last, prospects aren’t going to risk their careers given the training lead time required.

In the US, ATC are federal employees, aren’t they? So they are regularly furloughed, too. In the current political climate, facing the wrath of politicians doesn’t seem that unlikely, either.

The US has form in this area, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

Even if the federal government were to “pay up”, they cannot be relied upon to honor favorable contract terms since they also have the ability to change the law.

Conversation about how there’s a critical shortage of ATCs is at least a decade old, and likely older. “Best time to plant a tree” and all that.