America’s Demographic Future: Notes and Sources

Yesterday I published a story at FiveThirtyEight showing that Las Vegas is the metro whose demographics today look most like America’s projected demographics in 2060.

I also tweeted several datapoints and charts about demographic trends, including:

In the above tweet, “most common” is the mode, not the median or mean. For bi- or multi-racial, “0” means younger than one year, NOT the absence of data.

In the above tweet, the categorization of counties into six place types is described in the methodology note to this post.

These analyses are based on publicly available Census population estimates and projections, including:

These analyses use seven categories of race/ethnicity, which cover the entire population and are mutually exclusive. The Census asks separate questions about race and Hispanic origin; Hispanics can be of any race. The seven categories are among the full set here and include:

  • Not Hispanic, White alone
  • Not Hispanic, Black or African American alone
  • Not Hispanic, American Indian and Alaska Native alone
  • Not Hispanic, Asian alone
  • Not Hispanic, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone
  • Not Hispanic, Two or More Races
  • Hispanic