Today was the big day. The U.S. population hit 300 million people. In fact, as I write this near midnight Eastern time, the population clock now reads 300,005,079. This is up from 100 million in 2015, and 200 million in 1967. The Census Bureau projects that the nation will hit 400 million in 2043, thirty-seven years from now. (The world stands at 6,551,103,921 at the moment.)
But we will never see 400 million. That is my prediction. Why. We’ve explored this before as it has been known for years that birth rates are peaking.
Demographers missed the big population stories of the 20th Century until they were well underway…the great increase in life spans due to medical care and sanitation, the size of the baby boom after World War II, and the drop off of global birth rates afer 1980.
The prospect of decline is lost in the daily increase of global and national population. The world grows at about 140 people per minute. So we focus, and rightly so, on population increases and the resulting problems and opportunities. The day the decline begins, the problems and opportunities may only be larger, because we will have little experience with them.
1 chris ware on Dec 18th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
i think we will see 400 million either. i disagree on what
you say. the bith rate will increase and the death rate will decrease. then suddenly we will run out of space and we will eventually be catching diseases from one another. then alot of us will die because we will live so close together and we will get diseases. Oh yeahim 13 aint i smart
2 victor tang on Jan 5th, 2007 at 2:47 am
There is a chance of us seeing 400. If America again tops the world in technology(like fuel cells, nanotechnology and stem cells) or other stuff like economy, culture or finance(-9 trillion is a lot though), our immigration rate might jump, and immigrants could then contribute to the population through their children and grandchildren and so on.
However, this can backfire on us. China has highly developed in the past few years and when its economical status surpasses that of the U.S., Mandarin could replace English as the international language, causing more people to learn it, and China’s population would then increase with immigration, with some people coming from the U.S. as well.
So, if our economy doesn’t improve, our population won’t either, it can even go down.
There are obstacles that inhibit our growth and even immigration, such as high prices, job shortages and the perspective of america as an unsafe country, with the recent 9/11 and katrina.
3 mod*mom on Jan 5th, 2007 at 5:01 am
from your title, i thought you meant we’d all die out from global warming effects before we hit 400. i didn’t know there was a population decline since 1980. commenter chris ware has the popular idea. i think the yuppy no kids mentality of the 80s might be changing. a lot more people seem to be turning to religion in these scarey times of war + global warming + religions usually advise be fruitful + multiply.