This suggests that the second factor, fear, may be important in explaining America's shortage of staff. Nearly 4m people are not looking for work "because of the coronavirus pandemic", according to official data. And consider which industries are experiencing the most acute worker shortages. Jobs in health care, recreation and hospitality report the highest level of job openings, relative to employment. Many of these involve plenty of person-to-person contact, making their workers especially vulnerable to infection (a study from California earlier this year found that cooks were most at risk from dying of covid-19). By contrast, in industries where maintaining social distancing or being outside is often easier, labour shortages are less of an issue. The number of job openings per employee in the construction industry is lower today than it was before the pandemic.

The final reason for worker shortages relates to the extraordinary reallocation of resources under way in the economy. The headline growth in vacancies represents the rise in opportunities in some industries—say, clerks in DIY stores—as others decline, reflecting changing consumer demands. Analysis by The Economist of over 400 local areas also finds a wide variation in job churn across geographies: the gap between jobs growth in the most buoyant areas and that in struggling ones is twice as wide as it was before the pandemic. Workers may take time to catch up with this creative destruction. A former bartender looking for work in downtown Manhattan, for instance, may not quickly spot and secure a position as a delivery driver in farther-out Westchester.

As vaccinations continue to reduce hospitalisations and deaths from covid-19, and limit the spread of the disease, Americans' fears about taking high-contact jobs should fade too. But if shortages are to dissipate fully, and the threat of inflation is to be contained, some of the unemployed will also have to take up work in sectors and areas that are new to them.

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