Look at the dentists
Emailed on June 12th 2020 in The Friday Forward
If you weren't already jacked up about dentistry, here's something for a rainy day: Dentists make excellent economic indicators.
Dentist offices tend to be stable businesses that stick around for decades, unlike restaurants that open and close frequently. Dentists earn a healthy salary — a median of $159,000 — and offer services with no clear substitute. If you need your teeth cleaned or a cavity filled, the dentist is the only option.
This makes them, in the eyes of some economists, the perfect barometer for gauging the country’s recovery from the shock of the pandemic.
“If you look at your typical dentist office, nothing went wrong with their business model,” said Betsey Stevenson, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. “It’s just coronavirus that happened.”
By mid-April, 45 percent of dentists had laid off their entire staffs, according to data collected by the dental association. Only 13 percent remained fully open, with the remaining offices keeping a skeleton staff. Patient visits fell to 7 percent of normal rates.
The bounce back: By early May, 33 percent of dental offices had hired their full staffs back. The number rose to 58 percent by mid-May and, most recently, hit 77 percent the first week of June.
The downside: Even after last month’s job gains, the dental industry still has 289,000 fewer workers than it did before the pandemic. That suggests to Ms. Stevenson, the economist, that the industry — and the rest of the American economy — is far from recovered.
“The fact that dentistry employment is down 30 percent tells us that there is income loss, and there is fear,” she said. “We might not see employment in a retail store get back to the levels it had last year. But we should see dental employment get all the way back to where it was.”