Thread by @lymanstoneky

This NYT article by @ShawnHubler says that demographers are not surprised by California's slow growth (true) but 1) quotes zero demographers and 2) cites zero sources on dat and 3) says domestic migration isn't a driver (false). nytimes.com/2021/04/26/us/…

why would you title-check demographers *in the headline* without talking to any demographers???

before you say "writers don't make the headlines," the article text mentions what demographers think or say a few times too

feel like if you say a class of people thinks something in a publication for which you have been paid or received some other material benefit that you should be contractually obligated to cite *somebody*

anyways here's some California stuff. this is a best-approximation of what fertility rates in California have been over time.

note that California in the 1930s probably had a lower fertility rate than it has today, but from 1920 to 1930 was the ****fastest population growth decade**** in California's history (except 1850-1860 when the base number was super low)

1920-1930 was also a period of extremely strict immigration policy btw so idk maybe the "But surely our crappy policies aren't wrecking the state's demographic future!" bit is overwrought?????

i mean this stuff doesn't happen just totally by accident

the article does mention age at birth but they only compare the last decade or so. in the long run and vs. the national average, California's delay in fertility is not a sidenote!

i didn't do all the flatfiles before CDC WONDER kicks in so yeah that's a straight-line interpolation folks so shoot me

btw if you try to guess at tempo-adjusted TFRs in CA in the 1930s they're relatively even lower in all likelihood, and of course tempo-adjusted in CA today is somewhat higher due to delay.

Also, this whole "it's the Trump administration wrecking our immigration!" story is bollocks.

Here's the estimates we can derive of California's annual migration trends, 1936-2020, based on the available data about births, deaths, annual population, and immigrant inflows.

California's immigration rate has been in gradual decline since the 1980s, its periods of rapid growth were essentially entirely driven by *domestic* migration, and *on net* one out of every hundred Californians will leave the state each year. The gross value is higher.

Acting like high rates of population outflow from California is not a fundamental threat to the state's future demographic position, and a stark reversal of what drove California's historic growth, is just flagrantly ignoring the facts.

also, clearly what would actually boost California's population would be a major naval mobilization in the pacific and huge expansion of shipbuilding, for example, a major conventional conflict against China.

but nobody wants to say, "California got big because it was useful for fighting Japan"

because maybe if we don't want to fight conventional naval conflicts in the pacific clustering tons of people in a semi-arid, disaster-prone narrow strip of coastland is just not gonna be a highly efficient arrangement

alternatively, go for a 400 ship pacific fleet and watch that domestic migration rate get REAL high

or do the easier thing and fix housing costs

but empirically what jumpstarted California was not post-war affordability, but war-time industrial mobilization.

post-war affordability 1950-1965 built on that legacy, but it was the need to crank out a ton of war materials that made California, and it's been more-or-less downhill in terms of population growth almost ever since

if we needed to build twenty aircraft carriers in two years and the panama canal was under threat, housing policy would solve itself and workers' dormitories would be up in 6 months

https://twitter.com/CaesarSalad99/status/1387097973524369408

feel like people do not realize how insane wartime economic mobilizations can be

think "COVID closures" but in reverse.

folks, in WWII people were *conscripted into industry* in many places!

if the state wants to, it can, for a short period of time, generate essentially any amount of employment it desires in the name of mobilizing for a war for which there is a plausible shot at victory

or, as we have seen during COVID: if the state wants to, it can, for a short period of time, generate essentially any amount of unemployment it desires in the name of demobilizing in a pandemic, to the extent society believes that strategy is plausible

and as we have seen even when a large and vocal subset of society stridently opposes such a demobilization, nonetheless the state can generate extremely large unemployment effects!