Pop Drop
Despite a growing national population, around half of the counties in the United States are estimated to have lost population between July 2021 and July 2022. This we learn from the free bit of Matt Yglesias’s Slow Boring blog, based on Census data analysis.
The map:
Three states experienced total losses in population over the period: Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia (alphabetically). It would be interesting to see the county-by-county stats compared over different time increments, over two, five, ten, and 20 years, for instance. The Census Bureau offers such data and analytical tools, but it will have to wait for another day before I can get around to learning how to use them.
The question of why people are moving to more densely populated areas is easy enough to answer: We tend to like bunching up with others. Moreover, big metropolitan areas offer more opportunities not just for jobs, but also for whole careers. Rural areas don’t have that degree of promise for the ambitious. Although rural areas in poor states offer significantly lower cost of living, it isn’t enough to compensate for the lack of future prospects.
Urban economies often enjoy strong service sectors. Services are person-to-person businesses. They don’t work in rural areas with fewer people.
Rural economies have always been based on extractive industries to a large degree: mining, forestry, agriculture. As machinery has taken over jobs in those industries, there has been less work to support rural populations.
At some point, logically, rural populations will stop declining—presumably some time before total depopulation. When that will be, and how it can be turned into growth are the questions states like West Virginia have been struggling for decades to answer.
I read so many comments about medical practices below and just didn't know where to throw this in. Between the two of us, we have had experience with 4-5 large medical groups and only one has a really good patient portal. We have also come to a point at which a doctor's willingness/ability/commitment to returning calls or messages is a high priority for us. When meeting a new doc, I ask directly what we can expect on that question and it has been a reason for us changing doctors, too.
Morning all...Today is Take your son or daughter to work day, Tell a Story and Gummi Bear Day ( love gummies all of them especially the sour ones...lol). Not ever having children, I could never do the first one ( though once my niece asked to come to my work, that was cool) , or read to children much, though I would love to read them Dr Suess or something fantasy ..Like A Wrinkle in Time for instance.
My county has lost a lot of people...we aren't exactly rural, we have a lot of farmland, but also several medium sized cities. The largest city and namesake of the county was once about 100,000 people,. but, now it is around 65,000 I think, my city was around 50,00 and now is 35,000...lots of schools were closed too, even the Catholic High School, downtown is pretty quiet, the major Mall is dying, many restaurants are gone.... But almost all of that loss was due to The Shipyard closing, The Ford and GM plants closing and the steel mill ( which affected the shipyard ) downsizing a great deal. Then some more with the pandemic. However we also close to Cleveland and its suburbs, which are doing fine...downtown Cleveland is like 25 minutes from me, the open air mall type places ( called Commons) are closer than that. The cost of living here has always been lower than to the east of me in the big city areas...It has been a big change though, and I miss some things.
To show how ridiculously sentimental and silly I can be...there is a teeny tiny microscopic almost spider who built a web in my bathroom here at work. At first I just wondered what spiders that small can eat or can catch...there are bugs in here of course, ( and many I probably never see), but I have seen other spiders ( though mostly much larger "jumping type spiders like Wolf Spiders that are bigger than this little guys web...)and a hundred times bigger than the spider, beetles , lady bugs, occasionally a fly, ants...so, every day I watch and check in on him, and I worry he is going to starve to death and die...sigh...this explains who I am and why I respond the way I do about animals and disadvantaged people....I worry about all living things, even those that are not actually a good thing in some ways...I have ants in my kitchen as I do every spring, so Rick got the traps, there is no other way to get rid of them, and you have to, yet, it still bothers me that I am killing them ( and this also explains my feelings about killing and guns)...
Anyway, those are my ruminations for today...thanks for reading, other than my boss and roomie who are not quite like you guys , I don't have anyone else to talk to in person.