I recently saw an ad for Gerber on TV. It said that this October, the three millionth American will be born (and they’d be right there with it…or something).
Anyway, it got me thinking, is there a way to figure out who the 3,000,000th American really is? I mean, I know there is no way to tell EXACTLY how many people are living at any given moment…but still, could we make an educated guess as to who this lucky person is? Or would it just be impossible?
Sorry folks, typo…
Meant to say 300,000,000th.
Yeah, I was all set to guess Paul Revere, Ben Franklin, etc 
Tsk tsk. You should know that they weren’t born Americans. They hadn’t invented America yet!
Hehe.
To answer the OP, they’re probably not going to have any idea who that exact 300,000,000th baby will be, as the Census is not a continuing thing, with a count tallied at the end of each day marking each birth & death. What I’m sure will be done is that they will figure out a way to compute the birth rate and the death rate, in relation to the last accurate count of the American population, and figure out a date when that number will get to the 300,000,000.
I remember reading, I think on CNN, that the 300,000,000th birth will be in October and that the odds are great that the child will be a bouncing Hispanic baby. I’ll try to find a cite.
It was the New York Times, but I think that requires registration. Here’s the same general article from ABC news
You can make some guesstimates based on population increases, but in a country this large you could never know the exact time. I don’t know how many people are born per day in the US, but it would just be impossible to know on a minute-by-minute basis how many people there were.
The designation of the world’s six billionth baby was entirely ceremonial. The UN Population Fund picked an approximate date (Oct. 12, 1999), and I’m not sure how they picked the location - maybe it’s just wherever Kofi Annan was. He happened to be in Sarajevo, and the first child born after midnight that day was designated as the six billionth person in the world.
IMHO completely impossible because there are not adequate records to enumerate exactly who all the first 299,999,999 Americans are. And how do you count the slaves? Were they Americans? Do they subtract Americans who have renounced their citizenship? What if the 300Mth American is a naturalized citizen? Will Gerber be at the swearing in? What if it’s a person born to American parents living overseas?
Even if you could know the exact number of all Americans past and present, there’s no way you could arrange *a priori * to be present at the birth of the 300Mth. Based on 2002 birth rates, there are about 459 babies born in the U.S every hour. There’s no way to predict which one will be #300M and be there. It could be born in any hospital, birthing center, bedroom, or taxi. It could take days or weeks after the fact just to figure out which one it was.
This counting business is totally arbitrary and utterly marketing bullshit.
On reading other posts and thinkingn about the numbers for a sec, I realized I erred in thinking this meant the 300Mth American ever born. It apparently means the 300Mth American alive. Nonetheless, except for the slave business, all my objections still hold.
The ABC article you cited above disagrees, saying only that the chances it will be Hispanic have increased, not that it is likely.
Paul Revere, Ben Franklin, etc, were Americans. They just weren’t “United Statesians” yet. 
The Americas were named long before the United States of America was founded, and the inhabitants’ separate identitiy as Americans helped found the USA. As well as Quebec, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, etc…
How do we know that the 300 millionth American will be a new baby? Couldn’t it just as easily be an immigrant arriving into this country?
As a related question, what percentage of American population growth is from new births and what percentage is from immigration.
I remember reading the same thing. I more probably read it in the NYT. (free reg.) At the time, it was about how the 300 millionth child was probably being conceived around the time of the article.
Plus, it’s entirely possible that there are 299,999,999 people in the world. and then one is born, this becoming the lucky number 300 million. Seconds later, (or would it be a fraction of a second?) someone dies and the population drops back down (even though it is going up in general) so the next baby born also gets the title. Which one does Gerber want?
Having just finished perusing this thread, I saw the OP and read three billionth American.
And by the world, I obviously mean the USA. Preview preview preview.
Haven’t you Virginians freed all your slaves yet? AFAIK they’ve all been freed in the Deep South; I never suspected any holdouts as far north as Virginia. Get with it, you’re screwing up the tally.
(Seriously though, we’re not talking about the 300,000,000th American ever.
You just try calling me American and see how quickly I whip out the Death Glaresub[/sub].
Okay, but returning to the OP, how do we determine the 3,000,000th American?
According to this site:
http://merrill.olm.net/mdocs/pop/colonies/colonies.htm
The American population (okay, it wasn’t quite the “official” United States of America") was 2,780,369.
This site:
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/php/state.php
gives the total as 3,893,874. (For some reason, it didn’t give the totals of the states, so I used Excel.)
Therefore, the 3,000,000th American was born between 1780 and 1790.
It’s REALLY late here and I don’t have the time to compute a precise figure based on exponential growth so maybe someone else just might.
And what if, right after the 300 millionth American arrives/is born, 2 or 3 people die? Is their 300 millionth status revoked, and re-granted to the next birth/immigrant? These are all important questions that need to be considered.
OTOH, people born between Rio Grande and Tierra del Fuego will sometimes look tiredly at an “American” who is extolling the virtues of his home country and say “we’re american too, you know.”
Many hours were spent deciding what should we call them gringos if we didn’t want to say gringo, since they seem to find the term offensive. Americans? Ah, but that included our Colombians, Mexicans, Brazilians, Chileans and Argentinians. United-Statesans? Ah, but Mexico and Brazil are United States too. Yankis? Ah, but they don’t like it, any Texan who gets called a Yank is likely to climb all over you and not in a good way. Gringos, in the end we called them gringos and if any jumped we explained it was just a geographical reference and not meant to offend…