Why Care About Projected U.S. Ethnicity and Age?

Someone remind me: Why should I care what the ethnic makeup of the United States might be in 2050? Or the median age?

The U.S. Census Bureau finds it newsworthy that its just-released projection of U.S. population shows that Americans will be "more racially diverse and much older by mid-century." You have to read five paragraphs into the Bureau's press release to find out that in 42 years there will be 439 million of us, up more than 45 percent from today's 302 million.

Most news media took their cue from Census and similarly led their stories about this with the projected change in ethnic and age mix, backloading the projected population as a second and lesser angle to the story.

OK, more TV channels in languages other than English, and maybe at last some ethnic diversity in Congress. More worries about the future of Social Security. But can these compare in importance to half again more Americans than are alive today -- driving cars, needing houses, and generally pushing up demand for food and fuel -- in little more than four decades?

Imagine you could choose one of three ballot initiatives to vote on this November. In one initiative you vote on whether you'd prefer today's ethnic balance (two thirds European-American, one third "other") in 2050 or one in which there is no ethnic majority in the country. In the other you vote on whether you like today's proportion of working-age people (63 percent) or would rather have the 57 percent projected for 2050. Finally, you can vote on whether you prefer today's population or the much-larger one projected for 2050.

I'm betting most people would want to vote on our population size, which is going to have a far bigger impact on all of us and the way we live, rather than vote on what proportion of us have colored skin or gray hair.

It's pretty curious, given the country's aspiration to be unbiased by race or ethnicity, that the topic of our ethnic mix fascinates the Census Bureau and the news media so much. Maybe it's the sports-team effect that dominates so much of our political discourse: Hispanics are up! Whites are down! Blacks are holding their own!

Maybe it's just me, but I don't care what race, ethnicity or age Americans are. We're a diverse country, likely to become more so. Anyone have a problem with that? If the average age of the country rises, my reaction is the same as when my own age rises: Live with it, and be grateful. But 147 million more Americans in 42 years? Now that's something worth talking about.

Comments

[JackAlpert]

Robert Engelman's writes, the media is focused on the wrong sector of the population problem. It is not age distribution, its not race, or language distribution, it is too many people that should have our attention. He is worried that 143 million extra people in the US is a much worse problem than the race, or age, or ethnicity changes the media is presenting. And he is right as far as he has taken the idea.

Actually in 42 years, to get the future we want for our kids there should be half to a quarter of us on the globe. Rapid population decline (RPD) is not an easy thing to implement. There is just not much support for such a thing in any quarter. However, its benefits (the liabilities of not having RPD) should be hotly debated. It is probably the most important debate for the survival of the human experiment.

Jack Alpert
www.skil.org

[delayfx]

While ethnic makeup isn't particularly important, age is certainly an important thing to project; health care costs are absolutely a function of the age makeup of the population served, as are retirement/social security costs. A population with a lower proportion of working age adults will generate less revenue while consuming more services; it has different needs in terms of transit services, health care services, and many other things. An older population tends to move less, but requires housing capable of being lived in with the disabilities of age, for example. All of these lead to a necessity to project age makeup, without even touching on projections for education services for the component of the population aged 5-18.

Lumping age projections together with ethnic mix projections conflates two items of completely different utility.

[Yohomegirl]

What are we going to do when the minorities take over? Dance and sing. The white man has been at the top so long that he thinks that only he is right.

[ndolomar]

I know exactly why people care -- ahem, make that "media" care: fear. News organizations know most of the people reading these articles are Caucasians who will see the U.S. Census reports as a threat to their implicit position of power in American socioeconomic hierarchy. Thus, they need to get-a breeding, stet!

Tell you one funnier: A WSJ.com article somehow missed the inherent grammatical disagreement of the term: Minorities Will Make up the Majority.

By most surface-thinking standards, once you compose at least 51%, doesn't that by default remove the "minority" status?

Apparently, the United States is an anomaly, in that only here can you have a minority majority.

[Yohomegirl]

"Apparently, the United States is an anomaly, in that only here can you have a minority majority"
Yeah, just like the so called 'Moral Majority'.

[ndolomar]

Lol -- oh, so true, Yoho!

These Census Bureau studies sometimes do more to damage race relations than to show us how far along we've come.

As I used to tell my brother, who is very much a "damn The Man" type: If they make you think you're less, then you're less...more or less.