So why are people moving out? Taxes too high? Offhand, seems like a nice enough place-are the taxes too high? And-will the sate eventually become a huge old-age home? It must be tough to live there, with people moving out and all.
What do RI dopers have to say about this?
Is .3% statistically significant?
Actually the US as a whole doesn’t have a sustaining birthrate anymore; the population is only going up because of immigration. I would suppose then that Rhode Island isn’t attracting as many immigrants as New York or California.
It says here that
Maybe they were squeezed out because the state is too small. Hell, my back yard is bigger than Rhode Island. I’ve owned BREADBOXES that were bigger than Rhode Island.
Well, that’s why I left RI. I couldn’t get a job better than the one I had before my degree. Of course, that was more than a decade ago.
ETA:
Please. We prefer to be compared to icebergs, counties in Texas, and small nations.
Yea, the fact is as Americans become more obese, fewer and fewer of them will be able to fit in RI.
Considering that RI and Michigan were the only two states to actually lose population, I would say yes.
Okay, so let’s suppose that it is statistically significant----but is it significant in any other way?
The G in GD stands for “great”,. so we dopers can discuss the really important issues of our time. Some population shifts within the USA are important *. But some are a little less earth-shaking.
Or am I missing something ? Are there any major effects to be expected from a .3% population loss in a state that doesn’t have any major industries or points of interest? **
*Think Detroit vs silicon valley,with the resulting economic problems. Or snow belt vs arid southwest, with the resulting ecological and water problems.
** (but it does beat out all the other states for having the longest, most complex name 
)
Well, you know what they say: no man is in Rhode Island, or something.
On a plane ready to land:
Pilot: “Ladies and Gentlemen fasten your seatbelts, we are about to land at Providence Rhode Island.”
*Co-pilot: * [looks out the window] Chancey, are you sure that’s Providence?
Pilot: “What does it look like?”
Co-pilot: “Looks to me like there is nothing there!”
Pilot: “That’s Providence all right.”
From Super Chicken - One Of Our States Is Missing
Fun old country fact: El Salvador is about *half * the size of Rhode Island.
IIRC, such estimates aren’t the result of sampling, so they don’t have sampling error, which is the only sort of error that can be measured for statistical significance.
What the Census Bureau does is, starting from the last decennial Census’ figures, tallies births and deaths, and gets figures for inmovers and outmovers somehow. So the estimate is 2000 Census + births + inmovers - deaths - outmovers.
That’s subject to error, but unlike with sampling error, there’s no precise way of estimating the probability of a given amount of error.
I think that having these people in your state might encourage folks to leave en masse.
Land area of El Salvador: 8,124 sq. mi.
Land area of Rhode Island: 1,214 sq. mi.
Funny math they teach these days… :dubious:
Rhode Island is quite small. Providence is basically part of the Boston metro area. So if Rhode Island’s population drops a bit, but the population in Massachusetts and New Hampshire stays the same or goes up, I wouldn’t read too much into it.
(It’s interesting to note that RI apparently has a higher state income tax than Mass., which has a higher state income tax than NH. A lot of people who actually live in Mass. are on the books as living in NH)
I haven’t studied the demographics, but I would bet what is more significant is the drops in population that have taken place over the years in parts of upstate New York – places like Buffalo and Syracuse. Looking state by state, these drops would be masked by the massive growth that has taken place in the NYC area.
As a Rhode Islander, let me add that another factor is that housing prices have skyrocketed here, though that has obviously settled back a bit in recent months. I bought my house in 2000 and according to my tax evaluation this year, it has doubled in value. Part of the glory of living within the Boston Metro area.
However, payrates have not caught up to Boston yet, so the combination of higher housing costs, a relatively lower pay scale (for the northeast, not nationwide) and a lack of growth in jobs has led to this recent decline.
Currently Health Services and Tourism are the top two industries in RI. Both of which are chock full of low paying positions. And tourism of course adds the beauty of being seasonal around here. Sure its great to live in Newport, but good luck collecting a lot of tips November through March.
Oh, yeah - we get the point that Rhode Island is small. Just remember, thanks to the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport we have nuclear launch capability smart guy.
Massachusetts has been reported right alongside Rhode Island as a state with a population drop in past years as well. The Boston Globe and others say that immigration is the only thing keeping the Massachusetts population from dropping more than it has. One of the main culprits is that young adults find it too hard to start a life including a family in this general area. It is just too expensive for many and the barriers to get started are too high therefore they leave to go somewhere that they can find a nice house for $150,000. This is alarming when Massachusetts loses all those fresh MIT and Harvard grads because they simply can’t afford to stick around. There is also a general trend for people in the U.S. to migrate from the Northeast and other colder regions into the Sunbelt. Rhode Island certainly isn’t in the Sunbelt so it has that general factor working against it.
Rhode Island can’t do much about this in the short-term except to encourage more immigration. Taxes are too high for individuals and the state is often ranked the most business unfriendly in terms of taxes and business laws. Rampant corruption makes it even harder on business that want to play legitimitely.
Rhode Island is a cool state though. I live and work fairly close to it and go often. It is like Massachusetts without all the glitter and a slightly harder edge. Newport is an outstanding destination with row upon row of some of the biggest mansions you will ever see. It has good beaches in the Northeastern kind of way as well.
Not really sure why that’s alarming. I wasn’t aware that Massachusetts had some sort of proprietary claim to Harvard/MIT students, and i’m willing to bet that plenty of other states and regions would be happy to have their best and brightest return home after getting their degrees in Boston.
After all, if Harvard’s Class of 2010 is at all typical of Harvard and MIT intakes, only about 17% of students at those institutions come from New England in the first place, with obviously even fewer coming specifically from Massachusetts. Why they should all remain in Massachusetts after graduation is not really clear to me.
I blame the fact that I became an American 15 years ago…
But you are correct, I did reverse the ratio and El Salvador is the larger one.
(The grumble grumble thing is that I did look it up, but I made the mistake of looking for sites that compared sizes, got a factoid one)