Tag Archives: data

U.S. Population 1850-2060

Rational Death

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.

Continue reading U.S. Population 1850-2060 →

Annual Deaths In The U.S. 1933-2060

Rational Death,

Continuing with our data series, the number of deaths each year brings the percentages into a clearer picture.

You can see that for a long stretch of time, even while the U.S. population continued to increase (by how much? Hint: a lot—stay tuned for another chart), the number of people dying each year remained relatively static. Yes, the number of annual deaths increased, but very slowly.

As a side note: the reason I’m beginning this graph in 1933 is because we don’t know the actual death numbers from before that year. It took some time for the entire U.S. to buy into the need to keep such records. As early as the 1880s a few places like Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. kept official death records, but it was a slow process to expand the “death registration area” to encompass all of the nation.

If you look at the beginning on the left and follow the line across, you can see it took almost 70 years, from 1933 to 1999, for the mortality number to increase by a million, and for 10 years after that it barely increased at all. Population growth during the period made that line seem even flatter in terms of number of funerals per capita.

While population increased, and technology made work easier, people died from a lot fewer things, and life in general got better than it had been for the entirety of recorded history, there seemed to be less death occurring around most of us, including around funeral businesses. The latter were not unaffected by this ongoing state of affairs.

Here is a graph of the mortality figures in the United States from 1933 onward, and below it are the data by year.

Continue reading Annual Deaths In The U.S. 1933-2060 →

U.S. Death Rate 1880-2060

Rational Death,

To understand the funeral industry in America, it’s helpful to know certain facts.

First, how did the industry come to be? Death statistics show us the landscape the industry arose out of, which is a big reason for the role it played for a long stretch of time and, consequently, the types of businesses you will likely deal with if you have to go funeral shopping.

Second, where is the industry headed? Death statistics projections are also very interesting, because they show what the new landscape may look like. For people who think about what sort of funeral industry we will have in the coming years, and therefore what types of businesses we may be dealing with, projections are essential.

Being projections, the data for years after 2016 are hypothetical, of course (it takes a couple years to tally up all of the actual numbers); however, certain fixed realities make the projections reliable.

Chief among these realities is the current macro death rate of 100 percent. Unless they emigrate or teleport away, every single person in America is going to die, and will need to be handled by some type of mortuary agency, and for our species death relates closely to age.

In this and related tables, we will see exactly why the projections are reliable.

Through the course of U.S. history, there have been quirks in the data collection process. I hope to tell that story in the future, but for now the thing to know is we don’t have a continual data record of how many people have died. The data are less certain the further we look back in time. Measures of death rate are probably reasonably accurate going back to the end of the nineteenth century, but the actual mortality count is only really reliable after 1932.

Because of these inconsistencies, the data series I am showing start at different times …. but you will get the picture.

To begin this series of data posts, here is a graph of the death rate in the United States from 1880 onward, and below it are the data by year.

Continue reading U.S. Death Rate 1880-2060 →