What the census says about the U.S.

A high-resolution topographic map from NASA.


Kai Ryssdal: 308,754,538. That's how many Americans there are. I suppose technically you could call it a lagging indicator, since the official date for the census was this past April 1st, but it takes a while to sort through the data. And that's what people have been doing all day, mostly to talk about the politics of it: which states gained population -- and so will get more representation in the House -- and which states will lose.

But the data is really people. Workers and consumers, potential homeowners and future retirees. So we asked Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman what the numbers says about them and their economy.

Mitchell Hartman: The U.S. population rose by nearly 10 percent in the last decade. But that was actually the slowest growth since the Great Depression.

And for that, you can thank the Great Recession. A bad economy has kept the birth rate and immigration down. Early in the decade, population was also shifting a lot, with millions of people moving from the Rustbelt to the Sunbelt in search of jobs or a cozy retirement.

Kenneth Johnson: These trends might have been more pronounced had it not been for the recession.

Kenneth Johnson is a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

Johnson: Domestic migration -- people moving from one place in the United States to another -- really slowed down considerably in the last couple of years.

So, although Sunbelt states gained population, they probably would have gained even more if their housing and job markets hadn't crashed so hard.

Johnson: The economies in Arizona, Nevada or Florida are very dependent on growth itself.

Texas bucked the trend, though. Economist Ray Perryman leads a forecasting firm in Waco.

Ray Perryman: Texas did better than most states during the recession, and we did continue to receive some in-migration during the recession, it slowed down some but it continued at a pretty good pace, which is about 1,100 people a day. So it's a remarkable amount of economic growth.

Across the South, a big chunk of the increased population is Hispanic -- both immigrants and their U.S.-born children.

Perryman: Which again brings infrastructure challenges and education challenges and other things, but also gives us a young workforce, in some cases a very well-talented and trained workforce, and that's been something that's given us a competitive edge.

Because the Hispanic population is young, it's poised to spend heavily in coming years on higher education, first homes, and all the consumer goods needed to fill them.

I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

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Did I miss something? The story seemed to blame the slow growth on the "great recession," which started in 2007. Is the implication that 3 bad economic years drove an entire decade?

Just from this information a host of questions arise, hopefully to be answered as more details are reported. A rise in population, particularly under these circumstances, can be more of a curse than a blessing to everyone except politicians.

I will use my own little town as an example. We are (probably) going to be a net loser in population. Public services are being cut to 'balance budgets', and the weight of these cuts almost invariably fall on the poor. Poor people can, and sometimes do, freeze to death in our winters. Governmental help with heating for the poor was growing here before the "recession" and has grown almost exponentially since 2008. The funding for those programs has been cut by 25% for this winter, with further cuts planned for future years.

I would wait for data on the incomes of the people in the net gain towns before I got too carried away by the political and representational implications of this population shift. As usual where the rubber meets the road, things look a lot different than they do in the political arena. Down here there is almost nothing in the way of new jobs, and a growing number of people who have run out of everything and are one step away from being homeless. If the government can't put people to work, and cut funding for the truly needy, I fear that there will be little to rejoice about in the near future by most people. Yup, it sure is trickling down on us from above.

Mr. Perryman's comments are a bit optimistic. To say that the growing young Hispanic population is unequivocally an asset is to assume that the jobs of the future will actually be here in Texas and not elsewhere, and the jobs of the future are not in oil and gas; those are merely the jobs of the present.

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