Source:  Dr. Mike Walden, NCSU COLLEGE OF AG & LIFE SCIENCES, 7/15/11

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Although we have seen job creation in the past year, but if we want to get back to some sense of normalcy in the job market, what kind of job creation will the country have to undertake during the remainder of the decade? N.C. State University economist Mike Walden weighs in.

“An international think tank recently did some number crunching to directly answer your question. And as you might expect, they have to take into a lot of factors … (such as) how many people are going to enter the job market, how many people are going to graduate from school, how long existing workers are going to remain working before they retire, how long they stay in school et cetera, et cetera.

“And based on reasonable assumptions about all of those factors, this think tank concluded this country’s going to have to add 21 million jobs by 2020 to bring the unemployment rate  down to 5 percent.  And to give you some perspective on how big 21 million jobs is, currently we have a 138 million jobs. So this is a large number.

“And the scary thing is that if the recent pace that we’ve seen in the country of job creation continues, we’re only going to add half of those jobs, about 10 million.  So I think the bottom line from this report is the job market is going to remain a big, big issue for a long time.”