The scarcity of labor Wyoming has experienced due to the energy boom may be just a prelude to more severe shortages to come.

Next year, the U.S. is expected to cross a demographic threshold where the labor required to maintain a growing economy will begin falling short of the available labor.

And over time, the deficit will widen. Populations are aging and birth rates have been falling in many parts of the world.

"It's a true paradigm-changing event," Mark Lautman, director of economic development for Forest City Enterprises, Mesa del Sol, Albuquerque, N.M., said Thursday. He was addressing a Wyoming Economic Development Association conference at the Holiday Inn on the River in Casper.

"Basically, we're running out of labor and it's going to slam our economy shut," he said.

"There's going to be this massive hemorrhage of management skill and technical knowledge," he said.

Lautman said companies will deploy scouts to the nation's science classrooms in the same way Major League Baseball teams search for prospects.

Increasingly, Lautman said "the workers are going to have the power over where jobs get located," especially for the footloose jobs in the new economy. Skilled workers will decide where they want to live, and the jobs will follow them.

Such factors as increased immigration, baby boomers working longer and increases in productivity could mitigate some of the negative impacts, but Lautman doubts that will solve the problem.

Immigration, for example, won't be sufficient because many of the industrialized countries of the world are in even worse shape when it comes to looming labor shortages than the United States.

Lautman said Russia is losing 700,000 off its population every year as a result of low birth rates and declining life expectancy. China's population is expected to flat-line in 2015.

In some countries, having bigger families is viewed as "the new patriotism," he said.

The meaning of economic development will change, Lautman said. In the past, organizations often focused on creating new jobs, but in the future, jobs for skilled workers will be abundant.

One of the positive by-products of the sobering outlook is that job discrimination based on race or gender will largely disappear, he said. Communities also will get very serious about educating everyone.

Lautman listed six essential elements for community quality: a healthy ecosystem, affordable housing, affordable health care, an economy that is growing faster than population, low crime and world-class public education. He said if a community has problems with any two, that will drag down the others.

Trends to count on are a tightening labor market, shortages of skills and experience, shortages of educated job candidates and strains on organizational coherence.

Business Editor Tom Mast can be reach at tom.mast@casperstartribune.net, or call 307-266-0574.