Any demographers out there? How likely it is that the US will lose population this year? Next year I’m pretty sure the population will go down, but I’m not so sure about this year.
Explanation time: here’s the Worldometers page on the US:
Note the table a little ways down the page that has the title “Population of the United States (2025 and historical)”. The top line is what’s expected to happen in the US this year. Thise figures were put up early this year, Jan or Feb. The population figure there is that projected for the middle of the year. Note that it’s actually higher than the current count above.
The more important figures are the “Yearly change” and “Migrants (net)”. The first is only about 600,000 more than the first. That means that if lots of expected migrants don’t come in as expected, plus a large number are either deported or self deport, there may be no population increase this year and perhaps even a decrease.
Now consider how hostile the current admin is making it for immigrants, even legal ones. Do you think it’s possible that the net migrants will actually be -600,000 or more? Or that the coming recession will depress current growth enough to make a difference?
From what I can tell, the number of babies born in the US is still greater than the number of people dying, although that will surly change at some point in the future. The wild card is immigrants. If we allow immigrants to move here that may offset the drop in natural population, at least for a while.
Right. And that difference, based on those figures from the Worldometer page, is about 600,000. Which is not much comparred to the total population of 347M.
As a general rule, the number of babies born is a function of the economy. Recessions and depressions tend to depress the number of babies. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the birth rate went way down, for example. It stayed down during WWII because so many men were off to war. The Baby Boom after the war was a huge rebound of that. Admittedly, there’ll be some lag for this effect, so it may not make any difference this year even when the Trump Recession hits.
The point to ponder is that the average number of children born to each woman of reproductive age is below 2. The reason population is still going up is because due to a higher birthrate in earlier times, there are more women of child-bearing age, and hence more births, that there are much older seniors dying. Plus immigration. But over time, population replacement will drop. Immigrants tend to have more children (usually) but the next generation is same as other Americans. Russia and most of Europe are below replacement level. Maternity leave and subsidized daycare are excellent policies, but as Europe demonstrates, still not enough to encourage more children.
Most advanced countries have this issue. Japan is well below replacement levels, and apparently South Korea is the worst, with a birth rate of 0.89. Japan is already experiencing problems because of the population decline and lack of new workers. Every country has the same sort of problem as Social Security, that a system designed to provide old age pensions, based on about 10 workers per retiree, is becoming less financially sustainable as it approaches 3 workers per retiree.
Even developing countries are on the way to this problem. China’s population is shrinking already (two generations of single child policy will do that). India is set to level off in a few decades. Only the Middle East and Africa are failing to follow this trend.
The other side of the debate is whether this is in fact a bad thing. Wall Street may not appreciate a shrinking population, but our planet will thank us.
The number of babies born per woman has been dropping in every country since at least 1963. It’s higher in some countries than in others, but it’s been dropping in every country. China had a one-child policy from 1979 to 2015. From 2016 to 2021, it had a two-child policy. It now has a three-child policy. There are presently no restrictions on the number of babies a couple can have.
Yes, I know that. I was talking about what md-2000 was saying about “two generations of single child policy”. The single-child policy was changed several years ago. They’ve known for a while now that it isn’t a good idea anymore.
The “natural” population change (births minus deaths, doesn’t count net immigration) will probably be around 300,000 this year (around 3.6 million predicted births vs about 3.3 million deaths).
But the gap is narrowing; birthrates continue to be well below 2.1 and we haven’t hit peak Boomer die-off yet. Beginning in the early thirties, we’ll start seeing 4 million deaths every year and, without birthrates increasing from their current levels, annual births will creep inexorably towards the three million mark.
BTW, there’s a lively discussion currently raging about birthrates in Humble Opinion but a more narrow discussion of things here could be interesting, too. There’s also another less prominent thread about global population decline in that forum.
I’d think the US population will continue to drop due to
closing off immigration
recession if not depression right around the corner
even the existing pathetic excuses for government support of mothers, babies and children being choked off by trump.
I am not in the slightest in favor of population growth, anywhere on the planet, since we are at least eight billion souls more than than the earth can sustain without ever-increasing damage. But for those who think otherwise, there’s no positive news on the horizon.
I see that and I don’t know how to square that with other sources. CDC reports, for instance, 3.6 million births in 2024. I’m having a little trouble finding 2024 deaths but CDC reported in November that we were on pace for 3.1 million so we are indeed probably closer to a 600,000 increase than my number.
Annual deaths will increase to more than 4 million in the not too distant future.
as a side note, our (MO) idiot of a AG wants to ban contraceptives because we need more people, i.e. voters. Hasn’t our population grown due to immigrants being more “fertile” than rest of US?
The Project 2025 document includes several action items aimed at reducing use and availability of contraceptives. It’s definitely on the agenda of the people running the show behind Trump. Part of it is the practical need to reverse demographic trends by significantly increasing the white birth rate in order to counter the effect of ethnically cleansing all the brown immigrants, but of course part of it is simply their general attack on women’s independence. We’re in FQ, so further commentary would be out of bounds, but for the purpose of this discussion it’s sufficient to confirm that these people have clearly stated in writing that contraception is on their hit list.
Perhaps they should take a lesson from Romania. I think it was 1967, Ceacescu suddenly realised that the birth rate was excessively low, given the not-so-happy situation in an authoritarian communist country. Where were the next generation of happy workers going to come from? Like much of the countries behind the Iron Curtain, consumer goods like prophylactics were in short supply and the most common method of birth control was abortion.
So the government just arbitrarily banned abortion one day. over the next year, the birth rate almost doubled. The next year - it dropped back down to where it was before. Women adapted to accomplish what they wanted. (IIRC it was also the time when they started tracking women to detect pregnancies and prevent illegal abortions)
I think Freakonomics said it best in a discussion of birth rates - that women tend to have as many children as they plan to have. If they have an early unplanned pregnancy, they just have fewer children (if any) later. Widely available birth control just allows them to plan to have their children later when it’s more convenient.