The fast growing states in America according to the U.S. Census Bureau were:
- South Carolina
- Idaho
- North Carolina
- Texas
- Utah
There are a lot of ways to spin these numbers politically, but mathematically it is interesting to see Idaho so far up the list. That doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of people moved to Idaho because there were that many people there to start with compared to other states on the list. That is, Idaho got second place by increasing by just 28,861 people.
Compare that to South Carolina and North Carolina which came in with 79,958 and 145,907 people respectively, basically two or three times as many people. In other words, way more northerners wandered down to the Carolinas than Californians wandered over to Idaho.
Texas, of course, takes a lot of people to get a little percentage of growth. 391,243 people, more than the three states above it combined resulted in just 1.25% population increase.
That’s the other thing mathematically interestings. The growth percentages are so close together that they are meaningless without at least two decimal places, suggesting that despite crowing a “fastest,” the reality is that the differences were not large.
- South Carolina 1.46%
- North Carolina 1.32%
- Texas 1.25%
Tiny States Big Growth (Percentage wise)
Little Delaware grew by just 9,829, laughable even by Idaho’s standards, but that counts for 0.94% growth.
Vermont shrank 0.29% by losing 1,858 people. You could put all of them in a local high school, here in Colorado, not even a 5A one.
California lost four times as many (9,000) but that moved the needle just 0.02% down for the big state on the left.
Colorado, by the way, grew by 24,059 people an increase of just 0.4%.
People love to crow about red or blue this or that, but they’ll have to take a seat. Of the eight states that declined in population, four or five, depending upon how you count were red, making four or five blue.
So What?
What difference does this make to your financial situation?
Not much. This isn’t the same world as last century. So much of what we do crosses state lines, that those shoes may have come from a warehouse four states away after starting in a factory across the ocean. People move around a lot too. What is missing from these stats are the increasing number of snowbirds, or snowbird adjent, people out there who own, share, or consistently rent another home in another state.
What is starting to matter is which states have modernized the minimum wage. It turns out that the people who keep insisting that only a small amount of people earn minimum wage don’t have to be right. The wages of people above minimum wage tend to drift up to keep a similar distance between minimum wage and standard office worker drone wage.
That’s why you’ll have a hard time finding a professional job in Colorado that earns less than around $20 an hour. Even some McDonald’s offer $20 an hour to new employees, according to the big banners hanging off the side of their building. And, while housing costs are rising quickly in Colorado, they were before too.
It turns out that inflation is really more of a national construct, with exceptions for certain very expensive markets like NYC and Hawaii. Which makes sense, again when you look at how easy it is to be national for thing. Amazon alone ensures that what you pay with your $20/hr in Colorado costs the same as what you pay with your $9/hr in Alabama. Time will tell if this creates any new structural shifts.
In the meantime, South Carolina is #1! Brag it up, baby.