Continuing with our data series, this graph shows how the U.S. population has grown over the last 150 plus years. What doesn’t jump off the page is the rate of growth which was quite high relative to the size of the population prior to 1925.

To put it in context, the population growth rate in America from 1926 until now has been at or below 1 percent most years except for those between 1946 through 1964, aka the Baby Boom.

But from 1850 through 1925, apart from the Spanish Flu year of 1918, the annual population growth was near or even over 2 percent, which is remarkable. Actually, in the early years shown on the far left side, which I only break down by decade, the population increases each year were from 2 to 3 percent.

Much of the growth was from immigration, which is mainly a story for another day, except for the fact that most immigrants to America ended up living in the cities. Thus the period from 1850 to 1930 was one of growth as well as urbanization. And because the overall quality of life in cities was not so great back then, it was also a period of plentiful death.

As noted in a previous post, we don’t have accurate death totals from that part of American history, but we can do an interesting statistical experiment using the death rate from that early period, in a future graph.

For now, here is a graph of the U.S. population from 1850-2060, with the portion after 2017, obviously, projected, and below it are the data by year.