The conventional wisdom is that the United States is bound to have a labor shortage by 2010 or so. As more Baby Boomers retire, the thinking goes, there simply will not be enough bodies to replace them. Job hunters will find the pickings even easier than they did four years ago, when the economy was going full speed and you could land a job even if you didn’t know how to spell IQ.

Don’t bet on it.

The August issue of Fast Company magazine is the latest to argue that the labor shortage will be mostly myth, pointing out that more people these days are working well past the traditional retirement age of 65. It also points to a survey by the American Association of Retired Persons, which reports that more than 80 percent of the Baby Boomers it surveyed are expecting to work past age 70.

One source cited by Fast Company in its article, Professor Peter Cappelli of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, has been saying for at least a year that the worker shortage argument has some fundamental flaws.

Cappelli, the director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, had written in last August’s issue of Organizational Dynamics that productivity gains through technological advances mean the labor force doesn’t need to keep expanding for the economy to grow. He wrote that the U.S. economy is about eight times bigger now than at the end of World War II, but the workforce is only twice as big.

Cappelli also explained that even in the mid-1990s, when the college-age generation was supposedly small, about 20 percent more bachelor’s degrees were awarded than had been during the 1970s. So the amount of college-educated workers is hardly withering away.

My two cents: Another factor the economists might be overlooking is that technology makes it far easier for talented employees to keep working part time. You can put in enough hours to keep from getting bored, but not so many hours that you feel like you’re still in the rat race.

It used to be that working three hours a day might be ridiculous because you’d waste so much time and energy commuting. But if you could telecommute, especially with a flexible schedule and no worries about dressing up for the office, many workers might leap at that.

Retirement sounds wonderful to people work down by 50-hour workweeks, but lots of people miss the stimulation when they have no job at all.

More on Mensa: In a column a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned how Google Labs had placed an intriguing want ad in the monthly magazine for Mensa, the organization for people whose IQs are in the top 2 percent of the population. I thought it was a great way to reach people “who aren’t the least bit desperate to look for a job.”

One frustrated person who had been in Mensa e-mailed in to say that he or she had been unemployed for a long time, and that “the business community doesn’t give a damn about smart people.”

First, let me clarify. I meant that the ad would reach many employed people who wouldn’t normally read want ads — not that all Mensans are employed. Putting an ad in a newspaper’s sports or lifestyle sections might accomplish the same purpose, but Google wanted to zero in on a group of people with particularly high IQs.

Second, businesses do love smart people, but many of the smarts they’re looking for aren’t measured by IQ tests. The single most important piece of workplace intelligence is the ability to see things from other people’s perspectives, and that comes more from empathy than anywhere else.

In the workplace, a high IQ is both a blessing and a curse. If you use it wisely, it can help you solve problems faster and easier than other people can; if you use it unwisely, it can make you come across as bored or arrogant. That’s where you have to rely on your street smarts to help you — or you’re liable to find yourself out on the street.