The East is Dying
It’s Clickbait, But There Are Interesting Correlations in Fertility and Mortality Data
Just a quick post today. I’ve been working on getting stuff together for the release of the first episode of Migration Nation next week. You can subscribe to the Podcast here. Support the Kickstarter here. Check out our website here. I’m incredibly excited about this project; I hope you’ll check it out, subscribe, review, and support.
But in the meantime, today’s post isn’t about that. It’s about birthdays and funerals. Yesterday I covered some key migration-related findings in the new Census county population estimates. Today, I’m going to step a bit outside my migration comfort zone, and point out some interesting birth/death trends.
The Great Divide
East of the Mississippi, Growth is Slower
The above map shows natural population increase (i.e. population change not due to migration) for every county in the US in 2015. There are some striking trends. Utah, Colorado, California, Arizona, west Texas, Idaho, South Dakota, northern Washington… these westerly regions seem to form a fairly-contiguous bloc of high natural population growth. Contiguity doesn’t mean they have the same cause, but it is interesting. Meanwhile, with just a few exceptions are Atlanta, northern Indiana, and maybe NYC, natural population growth is much lower, or even negative, throughout the eastern United States. The largest geographic bloc experiencing population decline is that brown splotchy area between Kentucky and Virginia — oh, hello Appalachia. You’re not just losing people to migration, you’ve got a shrinking population even without out-migration.
Natural population increase is equal to births-deaths. So let’s look at those components.
It turns out that these maps have a bit of correlation. Those high-growth western counties have higher birth rates (left map), and lower death rates (right map). When we look at southern Appalachia, we see light colors on the left map indicating low birth rates, and dark colors on the right map, indicating high death rates.
Now, in fairness, this doesn’t necessarily mean that people in the west are having tons of babies, while people in the east are actually dying at higher rates. Much of those could just be different average population characteristics: maybe the West is younger and the East older. That would explain these trends. So don’t read me here as saying that people in the West are healthier, necessarily. I have no data on that question in this post.
Rather, I’m interested in the total population statistics. If the west is growing naturally, and the east dying, that’s significant.
But is it new?
The Rebounding Heartland
Natural Population Increase is Growing in the Plains
The above map shows changes in natural population growth rates from 2010–2012 to 2013–2015. As you can see, population growth has really heated up in some western areas, especially the Mormon states and the western Great Plains. Meanwhile, population seems to have a much more anemic trend in most of the east. So then the west-east divide is at least partly a product of the last 5-years. That’s interesting.
But what’s driving these changes?
First of all, an oddity: it seems like birth and death rates are rising everywhere. That’s odd. I think there may be an oddity here in Census’ treatment of 2010 data due to the partial year, but it should be consistent across regions, so the relative regional changes should be consistent.
As you can see, the faster population growth in the Plains states is largely due to increasing birth rates. Again, I don’t really know why that’s happening, or why Colorado is so abruptly left out. On the other hand, death rates are rising fastest throughout the east, and slowest in the Mountain states. Death rates rose a bit slower around New York and other urban areas; indeed it seems to me like eastern rural areas have the sharpest death rate increases in many cases. I’m not sure why.
Conclusion
Natural population increase is not fixed, but rather varies across place and time. Trends in births and deaths are not the same as in migration, and evince a much weaker regional pattern. All the same, western, mountain, and plains areas appear to show the most robust trends in terms of natural growth, while eastern rural counties are struggling or declining. This trend may relate to migration if young high-fertility, low-mortality people leave the rural east and move to the west. But it may also relate to future migration if companies, universities, and other migratory attractors don’t move as much as people. In that case, the generation being born in the west today may find themselves headed back east soon enough.
See my previous post, recapping the 2015 county population estimates.
If you like this post and want to see more research like it, I’d love for you to share it on Twitter or Facebook. Or, just as valuable for me, you can click the recommend button at the bottom of the page. Thanks!
Follow me on Twitter to keep up with what I’m writing and reading. Follow my Medium Collection at In a State of Migration if you want updates when I write new posts. And if you’re writing about migration too, feel free to submit a post to the collection!
I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
