2020s on Track to Have the Slowest Population Growth in U.S. History

New Born

The U.S. Census Bureau released its population projections for New Year’s Day and the next decade may be the slowest-growing decade in U.S. history, according to The Associated Press.

The projected population is set to be 335,893,238 by midnight on Jan. 1, 2024, an increase of 0.53% or 1,759,535 people from the previous year, according to the Bureau. Despite this, William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, a public policy nonprofit, said that the 2020-2030 decade looks to be the slowest in history at less than 4%, noting the previous slowest decade for growth was 7.3%, according to the AP.

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Commentary: The Demographics of Polarization

Women around the world are having fewer than two children. But while population decline is well underway in most nations, there are a handful of nations that are still experiencing a population explosion. The implications of this challenge the foundations of cultural and national independence, most particularly in nations whose populations have stopped reproducing. The nations still experiencing rapid population growth have cultural traditions that stand in stark contrast to the nations with stable and declining populations. These profound demographic and cultural differences, when combined with a massive and ongoing transfer of people from high birth-rate nations into low birth-rate nations, introduces the potential for polarization on an almost unimaginable scale.

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Commentary: If Demography Is Destiny, So Are Suburbs and Small Towns

cars parked in front of red brick building

Policy and politics often collide at the intersection of geography and demographics. The non-urban, non-college-educated white voter causing concern among Democrats these days, the suburban voter of 2018, and the heartland voter of 2016 are all profiles built on the common interests of certain people in certain types of places.

After 18 months of domestic migration prompted by a pandemic, another interest in addition to where people live has emerged in this equation: where people wish they lived.

Americans of all stripes, including young people, have long preferred suburban to urban living despite the prevailing (mis)conception in the media, but the twin crises of Covid and urban unrest in 2020 have clearly accentuated Americans’ desire to leave denser places. Not only have Americans continued apace in their usual migration from cities to suburbs, they also now aspire to live in towns and hinterlands more than one might expect.

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Generation Z: The Intolerant Ones

Millienals

by Ben Cohen   The post-millennials have arrived. As the oldest millennials turn 37, demographers have designated a new generation for those born after 1996, Generation Z. The oldest members of this cohort just graduated from college and had their first (legal) alcoholic beverages. As they wind their way through college, post-millennials…

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