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Tuesday, 24 February 2026
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Written by John Hood
North Carolina’s economy just posted a sizzling 5.6% growth rate. Since 2020, the average income per North Carolinian rose faster than the national and regional averages. And our headline unemployment rate in December was 3.9% — quite low by historical standards.
So why I am not all smiles? Because another important measure is heading in the wrong direction. According to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of working-age people who are either working or looking for a job has been dropping for nearly four years.
Before the onset of COVID-19 in early 2020, North Carolina’s labor force participation rate had for many years fluctuated between 61% and 61.6%. Another measure, the ratio of employed people to the general population, rose fairly steadily from 57.5% in January 2015 to 59.2% in January 2020.
Then came the pandemic. Employment crashed for several months, then bounced back in 2021, then started declining again in 2022. As of December, just 59.2% of North Carolinians over 16 are in the labor force. The employment-to-population ratio is 56.9%. In both cases, we are below the national average.
To be clear, though, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' measures of labor force participation and employment-to-population haven’t just declined in our state. They’ve gone down in lots of other places, too. And even for the nation as a whole, while labor force participation and the employment-to-population ratio haven’t tumbled since 2022, they remain below pre-pandemic levels.
In part, these trends reflect the aging of the population. No doubt you’ve already heard some version of this story many times. We are living longer than before, and in particular, we are living longer after retirement than previous generations of Americans did. On the other end of the labor pipeline, our rates of family formation and fertility are lower than they used to be. Everything else being equal, the ratio of workers to retirees must shrink.
Why care about that? Because retirees rely on those still in the labor market to supply their needs, either directly (because they’re being cared for by children or other relatives) or indirectly (because workers pay taxes into Medicare and Social Security, staff the companies from which retirees earn investment returns, and produce the goods and services that retirees consume). Again, everything else being equal, a smaller number of workers supporting a larger number of retirees might end in economic or political catastrophe.
All things are not, however, equal. There are multiple ways out of this doom cycle. One is immigration. Importing working-aged people expands the base of the pyramid, at least for a time, and perhaps for longer than that if the newcomers have persistently higher fertility rates than native-born citizens.
Another is innovation. If we organize workers more efficiently, or make them more productive through training and technology, or supplement their labor with robotics and artificial intelligence, they may well be able to generate enough economic value not just to support non-working adults (and children) but to continue to raise their standard of living over time.
Finally, we can try to change the parameters of the scenario directly. That is, we can induce more young people to marry and have children, induce more working-aged people to get off the sidelines and back into the labor force, and induce more older people to work full- or part-time long past the standard retirement age.
On this high-stakes quiz, my answer is, unabashedly, “all of the above.” And yet I recognize that reforming immigration is politically challenging, and expanding automation and AI is becoming so. I recognize that many non-elderly people outside the labor force have caregiving responsibilities, debilitating physical or mental ailments, or other barriers that make it difficult to keep them productively employed. And I recognize that there may be limits to how much government can or should influence private decisions about marriage, fertility and retirement.
There are no easy answers — and the longer we wait, the harder they’ll get.
Editor’s note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
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Tuesday, 17 February 2026
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Written by John Hood
With the 2026 primaries rapidly approaching, you may well live in a jurisdiction where Democrats or Republicans are actively contesting nominations for Congress, state legislature, or local office. All voters can, of course, play a role in setting the table for this year’s U.S. Senate contest.
Are you up on these races? Even for political junkies, keeping up with it all can be a challenge. And it’s about to get harder. If present trends continue, North Carolina will have added enough new residents by 2030 — and other states will have lost the requisite residents — for us to gain a 15th seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
I’m all for North Carolina securing more influence over national policymaking (our expanded congressional delegation would also mean bigger clout in presidential primaries and the Electoral College). On the matter of House seats, however, my preferences are far more radical. A one-seat gain is paltry. I think North Carolina should gain 39 seats.
That is to say, I think the House of Representatives is far too small. When the Founders created the institution in 1787, they apportioned one member for every 33,000 residents of the new United States. A key framer of the Constitution, James Madison, proposed that once the House reached 200 members, it ought to grow automatically to maintain a ratio of one member for every 50,000 constituents. If districts grew significantly more populous than that number, he argued, the resulting U.S. House would be too elitist and its individual members would lack “proper knowledge of the local circumstances of their numerous constituents.”
While Madison’s congressional-apportionment plan never came to fruition, the chamber did grow periodically throughout the early decades of the republic. Since expanding to 435 voting representatives in 1913, however, the U.S. House has grown increasingly unrepresentative.
House districts currently contain an average of 761,000 people. When the current cap was instituted in 1913, districts averaged 211,000 constituents. If that were the ratio now, the House would have approximately 1,572 members. North Carolina would hold 50 of those seats today, a delegation that would grow to 53 seats or more after 2030.
Sound preposterous? I admit that expanding the chamber so quickly might be hard to pull off. A bigger House would differ from the current institution not just in degree but in kind, with significant changes in organization, staffing, and operations. In 2021, a team of scholars proposed a more gradual approach: adding 150 seats. In that scenario, North Carolina would have 18 seats today and as many as 21 seats after 2030.
Why expand Congress? Many wise reformers have offered many sound arguments over the years. It would restore a clearer distinction between the House and Senate. It would enhance local representation and constituent service. It would diversify the chamber in a variety of ways. And it would reduce the extent to which House districts are gerrymandered to favor a particular party or incumbents of either party.
That last point deserves emphasis. As North Carolina’s history makes abundantly clear, the temptation to engage in creative political cartography extends across party lines and is exceedingly difficult to resist or constrain. I’ve fought for redistricting reform my entire adult life, and will do so again in advance of the 2030 Census. But I also admit that neither a “nonpartisan” commission nor judicial oversight will ever be a foolproof defense against abuse, and even reformers sometimes disagree about whether “good” maps maximize proportionality (the extent to which district-by-district outcomes reflect statewide tallies of partisan preferences) or competitiveness (the number of seats that could change hands from cycle to cycle, which may well produce wildly disproportionate outcomes).
Vastly increasing the number of U.S. House districts won’t eliminate gerrymandering. But legislative districts are, on the whole, more competitive than congressional districts. And in states and countries with lower ratios of constituents to representatives, gerrymandering is less effective.
In this one area of government, I submit that bigger is, indeed, better.
Editor’s note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
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